[mythtv-users] OT:General hardware question

[Jason Schloer]

So right now I'm running a 60gig and a 160 gig drive in an athlon XP 2600,
with two M179's and a pcHDTV card. Realizing I'm using very little CPU on
this and want to move to a client server setup at home since I have more
than one TV I've decided to try moving the encoders/tuner to a smaller box
and use the athlon downstairs by the HDTV. Anyway, background aside, I'm
wondering if the machine I want to put the cards in can handle it. It's only
a P2-450(dual cpu board, but only one cpu, can upgrade to two if needed for
14$), but I have an ata/100 pci card for the drives. My question is can I
push that much data through the bus? My current settings put the M179's at 2
gigs hour/each, plus up to 7 gigs/hour for the pchdtv. So a max rate of 11
gigs/hour. My guess is that using DMA on the drives would allow it to happen
exclusively on the PCI bus, so the CPU shouldn't limit anything. I'm just
wondering if PCI is fast enough. I read somewhere that PCI runs at half the
bus speed. My current bus speed is 266, so 133 on the Athlon machine. The p2
has a 100mhz bus, so 50mhz on the pci there. I think that's everything. Does
anyone have any thoughts, or math that might help one way or the other?
Thanks in advance,

-Jason

 

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