[mythtv-users] What NOT to do to your Myth box...

[Maarten]

On Friday 14 January 2005 17:34, Paul Kidwell wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Scott Alfter

> > That's why you offload TV shows onto DVD instead of keeping them on the
> > HD forever.  (Admittedly the stuff that's out there for making DVDs under
> > Linux isn't all there yet, but I've gotten fairly good with a handful of
> > Windows programs that make DVDs out of stuff ripped from my TiVo or my
> > MythTV.)

I personally wouldn't want that.  Before you know it you have to search 
through tons and tons of DVDs to find that one special show.  I'm glad I got 
rid of the mess of floppies, and I'm not about to start over with DVDs...

In any case, the price comparison between DVD-media and harddrives isn't that 
negative for harddisks; You pay just twice as much for the comfort of a hdd.
To me, that's usually worth it.

> Which is what I was planning on doing, but it didn't work out that way. I
> installed a pair of 200Gig drives into my win2k box set up as a mirrored
> Raid array. (I'd recently had yet another disk crash and I didn't want to
> loose *anything* anymore)
>
> Well...  Authoring the DVDs was going slower than the .mpg files were
> coming in. I filled up 200Gig rather quickly. and a friend talked me into
> converting my array into a "striped" RAID array. So now I had 400Gig. Which
> quickly filled up to 350Gig of recorded programming...

...I just know what's coming...

> Needless to say, it only took a month for one of the brand new drives to
> crap out :(

...bingo.  :-(  Tell your "friend" to store his _own_ data on stripesets.
I use raid-5 only.  That's the best you can choose; it is a nice compromise 
between striping and mirroring.  Only thing is, you gotta think / buy in 
advance, since you can't really easily 'grow' a raid-5 array.

What helps too, is not to put stacks of drives into cramped cases that need to 
be silent as well. Instead tuck them away in the basement with ample cooling.
High temperature is a harddisks' enemy no. 1 !

Needless to say I'm no fan of combined backends/frontends.

Maarten