[mythtv-users] HD buffer size important?

[James L. Paul]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Thursday 01 April 2004 07:04, Brian Stults wrote:
> I'm looking to buy a hard drive to expand storage.  I am very attracted
> to the Samsung 160GB drive.  It got a great review at silentpcreview,
> with a claim that it may be even quieter than the venerable Seagate
> Baracuda IV.
>
> Newegg.com currently has a sale on the version with a 2 GB buffer for
> $93.  The one with an 8 GB buffer is $123.  My question is how important
> is buffer size for mythtv?  I am on a very tight budget, so I can
> probably not afford the $123 drive, but I don't want to buy the $93
> drive if I'll be dissatisfied.

I suspect you mean 8MB versus 2MB onboard driver buffer, MB, not GB. ;)

I haven't done any studies, but I would expect the difference between 8MB and 
2MB to be inconsequential. Even if it turns out that the buffer helps out 
when reading the ringbuffer when watching live TV (which I don't know that it 
does) the performance needs of a 1 or 2 tuner MythTV backend is way less than 
any modern hard disk provides.

I use cheap 5400RPM drives with 2MB buffers and don't come anywhere close to 
bottlenecking the drives. With DMA enabled, on my Athlon 1.4GHz 
backend/frontend box I can record 2 shows at the same time while watching a 
third, transcoding a fourth and copying files to my laptop over the network 
all at the same time. And my drives still aren't a bottleneck, only CPU is.

When people talk about needing seriously fast storage hardware for video work, 
they are generally talking about uncompressed or raw video. We're not using 
that here, we only need to move a gig or two in a couple HOURS, not 
minutes. ;) That's slow by hard disk standards. Don't worry about the buffer 
size. It's going to be largely useless for speeding up large video file 
access anyway.

> Specs:
> PVR-350
> 512 MB DDR
> Athlon XP 2000
>
>
> Thanks!
>
> http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?description=22-152-011
> http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=22-152-014
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFAbJFNT8BYaKRUpkQRArdzAJ9Y6dTJKFQQFj4qbEdUHITkmxsAQQCgm1Wi
Hp9RAra2Kwt0Fbjst8b6jno=
=YyNR
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----