[mythtv-users] OT: 160 gig WD - $40

[sschaefer1 at woh.rr.com]

I use 4 IDE drives on the motherboard's (2) IDE controllers. Using them as a stripe set in their master-slave configuration is fine, even for my VideoToaster which does uncompressed D1 NTSC/PAL video. I don't quite think it is as fast as 60 MB/s, but if I remember right the test utility reported an average of ~52 MB/s... until about 40% of drives were used then it quickly dropped down to ~26-22 MB/s. I'm still wondering how USB 2.0 would do... yes it'd be a permanent connection, and cheaper than SCSI, and possibly cheaper than SATA, especially since I have no open PCI slots, but available USB 2.0 ports.

----- Original Message -----
From: Brad Templeton <brad+myth at templetons.com>
Date: Monday, March 21, 2005 3:37 pm
Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] OT: 160 gig WD - $40

> On Mon, Mar 21, 2005 at 07:18:07AM -0500, Jeff wrote:
> > With IDE you only want one drive on a cable (controller
> > port) as only one drive can transfer data at a time. You can
> > get a 2nd IDE controller card (better to get a S/ATA card perhaps
> > at this point) and run 3 HD's using the 4th channel for your CD/DVD
> > drive. Best to get the largest disks you can (but look for 3yr
> > warranties which tend to be more expensive).
> 
> What do benchmarks say about this?  Current systems and drives 
> come with
> 100 megabyte/second or 133 megabyte/second ATA bus speeds.   The 7200
> rpm drives, on the other hand, tend not to be able to sustain data
> rates more than about 60 megabytes/second, and of course rarely 
> are they
> actually doing this, they spend most of their time seeking or idle.
> 
> So, is it really true that you only want one drive on the cable?  Are
> there some benchmarks out there showing the throughput for the 2 on
> one cable vs. 2 on 2 cables?   I am sure there is some loss here, but
> how much is it?
> 
> As you probably know, MythTV tends to rarely need more than 2 
> megabytes/secondof disk bandwidth to play or record even an HD 
> stream.  This is so far below
> the capacity of these channels that it seems odd to me if there would
> be much gained by buying additional disk controllers to squeeze out
> a little more bandwidth, but I am curious as to the numbers you 
> may have.
> 

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