[mythtv-users] Re: Partition and Filesystem choices for MythTV

[Omer Shenker]

On Wed, 6 Aug 2003 17:50:14 -0700 Couvrette, Jeffrey C. wrote:
> I was wondering what the best way to set up the partitions 
> and filesystem
> for best performance with MythTV.  Would it be good to use a second
> harddrive to save video to, as it is recommended to do with 
> video editting?
> Is it good to at least use a separate partition to save video 
> to?  What is
> the best filesystem to use on the partition where video will 
> be saved?  And,
> what are some of your recommendations on how to set up a basic Linux
> filesystem, such as a separate /boot, /usr, /temp, /home and 
> / or not and
> what sizes do you typically use?  If you want to answer specific to my
> system, I have a 2 GHz Celeron, 200 GB Harddrive, and 512MB 
> memory, but I am
> curious what people use in general.

Jeffrey,

If you can, use LVM to split the video storage over multiple physical drives
as another reply suggested. (If you've got multiple physical drives, also be
sure to split your swap over them--not that you want to go into swap while
running myth.) For the most part you don't need any fancy partition scheme.
If you're reading sources that tell you to make a separate /boot, ignore
them; that was a workaround for old BIOSs. You might want a separate /home
if you're also going to be using this as a normal system and you like to
wipe the root filesystem when you reinstall. Personally, I'd rather just
move /home to another drive or system on those rare occasions.

Right now my root partition has 4.4G, but that includes /home and lots of
software I don't actually use. If you want to be conservative, give yourself
10G for the root partition. For that, use any filesystem that's
well-supported by your distro. Usually ext3 and reiserfs are good choices.
For the video storage, I'd recommend against reiserfs; it's optimized for
dealing with lots of little files. (This is great for your root partition,
which has lots of files--mine has FIXME.) Instead use ext3 and format it as
follows, where DEVICE is /dev/hda1 or whatever:
$ sudo /sbin/mkfs.ext3 -T largefile4 $DEVICE
$ sudo /sbin/tune2fs -c 0 -m 0 $DEVICE
The bigger the storage partition the better, of course. I wouldn't worry
about filesystem performance degrading on huge partitions since you'll have
relatively few files and they'll tend to be written once and not enlarged or
truncated.

-- 
Omer Shenker                          http://omershenker.net/