[mythtv-users] Hard drive recommendation

[James L. Paul]

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On Friday 20 February 2004 12:14 pm, steve at nexusuk.org wrote:
> My 9 month old 80 gig drive recently died in my Myth box, so I sent it
> back under warranty.  Rather than swapping the drive with a new 80, the
> reseller has refunded me with the original amount of money.  Obviously 9
> months ago, hard drives were rather more money, so I get to buy a nice
> shiny new 120 or 160 gig for next to nothing.

Cool. I've replaced many drives under warranty, but never from a reseller, 
always the manufacturer.

> So, a couple of questions before I go buying a new drive:
>
> 1. Any recommendations on a good drive for Myth? (quietness is a must)
>
> 2. is 7200rpm actually useful?  The system has a single BTTV card, but I'm
> planning to add a PVR350 at some point in the future, so it will
> eventually be capturing 2 streams at once while paying another.  If I
> don't get any real benefit from a 7200rpm drive then getting a 5400rpm one
> would cut noise and heat (not to mention they're cheaper).

7200rpm generally generates more heat and consumes more power. It gives faster 
seek/access times and higher throughput. That's important if those things are 
performance bottlenecks for whatever you are doing. IMHO, 5400rpm is more 
that adequate for a dedicated MythTV box.

> 3. Not really related to the drive itself, but does anyone know where I
> can get rubber drive mountings?  I don't want the full-blown drive
> enclosures with heatsinks on them, etc.  Just some rubber mountings to
> bolt the drive down with.

Cheap O-rings can work fine. Actually, I've never heard noticeable noise from 
a drive itself from more that a foot outside the case that rubber-mounting 
would fix. There simply isn't much audio-frequency vibration for most drives 
to transfer to the chassis. My problem is heat dissipation, and 
rubber-mounting a drive is like insulating it from transferring heat to the 
chassis. Remember, the drive mounting cage or brackets are usually the 
primary "heatsink" that cools the drive. The metal contact along both sides 
of the drive drains _way_ more heat from the mechanism than moving air with a 
fan. Fans are the primary noise source in every machine I've built. I've had 
a few noisy drives, but in the past couple years they've all been pretty 
quiet, mostly WD and Maxtor units here. (I replaced 12 IBM units after a huge 
round of failures a couple years ago, they had a bad model series back then.)

By the way, you are digitally signing your posts, but your key isn't on any of 
the usual keyservers. What keyserver do you use so I can tell my system where 
to go to update my keychain? There's not much point to using signatures if 
nobody can validate your key. ;)
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