[mythtv] New idea for storing recordings to disks

[Thomas M. Pluth]

Comments?

  How about something like this ;

1) Define a single location for recordings.  This should be a high speed
disk right on your master backend and have enough available space to handle
your typical daily recording load.

2)  Define a group of long term storage locations.  These could be on a file
server, a large capacity USB or firewire drive, or wherever you happen to
have available space.   Each of these drives would be a separate mount point
(/myth/recordings1, /myth/recordings2, etc.).

3)  Modify mythcommflag to optionally move the file from the primary
recording location to the long term storage location as it's performing
commercial scanning.

  I would implement this such that each long term storage location could be
assigned a priority of 1-n.  In the recording options, add a storage
priority for each recording schedule that will control whether it gets moved
or not and to where. Specifying a priority of 0 would leave the recording on
the original location, specifying 1-n would cause mythcommflag to move it to
the appropriate long term storage locations.   It should be possible to
define multiple locations with the same priority, as well.

An example ;

Drive      Priority  Drive type    Description
-----                ------------  ----------------------------------------

/dev/sda      0      146GB 15K     Contains O/S, swap, live TV ringbuffers,
                     U320 SCSI     primary recording location 

/dev/hda      4      80GB 7200     An old 80GB drive you had laying around
                     EIDE          for your children's Barney recordings

/dev/sdb      1      300GB SATA    Your important shows

/dev/sdc      1      300GB SATA    Your important shows

/dev/sdd      2      200GB USB     Your less important shows


 This implementation would let you use your highest performance storage
devices where they'd do you the most good and would allow you to use lower
performance devices (USB, Firewaire, etc.) for recordings without impacting
the ability of the backend to keep up with I/O activity during heavy
recording periods.  You would also be able to add storage on the fly by
plugging in another USB or Firewire drive at any time and adding it to an
existing priority.

  Look Mom, no LVM, no RAID, no separate file server!