[mythtv-users] Draft revisions to HowTo section 3.3, second try

Ray Olszewski ray at comarre.com
Wed Apr 23 20:44:10 UTC 2003


At 02:58 PM 4/23/2003 -0500, Kelly Reed Schuerman wrote:
>Just a comment on system requirements, in section 3.3.3 would it make sense
>to discuss harddrive speeds and their relevance to system performance?  I've
>had great success recording a show at 480x480 MPEG-4 while watching a
>previously recorded show using an Athlon 650 with 256MB PC100 SDRAM.  I
>believe the speed of my IDE channel and harddrive (UATA100, 7200RPM) has a
>lot to do with that. I have recently put in a second tv tuner, reduced the
>quality to 320x480 to compensate and I have been successful recording two
>shows at once.
>
>Just thinking out loud...

Saying *something* about this topic appeals to me. But ... what? Aside from 
the fact that DMA support is a must, what do we as a group concretely know 
about performance requirements for IDE drives? (For that matter, does 
anyone here use SCSI? What are those of you who report capturing to NFS 
mounts use?)

What rotational speeds, seek times, UDMA levels are needed? How much does 
it matter if the live-buffer location is on a different physical drive from 
the long-term-storage partition? If you use 2 drives, how important is it 
that they be on different IDE channels?

Because hard drives for vidcap have to be big, they typically have to be 
fairly new as well. My only actual vidcap experience is with drives that 
are 7200 RPM, use UDMA133, and are les than 18 months old. I don't know 
whether a 5200 RPM drive, or an UDMA33 drive, would work or not, and I 
hesitate to say it would not given my lack of presonal knowledge. I have 
guesses about the answers to some of the other questions I posed, but 
guesses aren't answers, not for a HowTo, anyway.

But is there someone else here who knows something more concrete than I, or 
than Kelly's imprecise "I believe ..."?





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