[mythtv-users] Using firewire or usb external drives

[Robert Denier]

I've found that the little 2.5 inch usb 2.0 external drives I've messed
with can be a bit of aggravation.  In the end it did work well, but I
wouldn't recommend it for someone non familiar with it.

While I haven't used myth a great deal, I sort of planned to leave one
drive in my backend and leave the bulk of the storage in a seperate
nfs/samba file server.  This of course avoids the need of dealing with
usb file systems.  (It is assumed that the shows kept will be transcoded
and stored on the file server.)

If your worried about performance I'd really avoid usb type file
systems.  In theory usb 2.0 can be pretty fast, but the conversions and
overhead of usb can't be helpful.  It might be larger than any overhead
due to file systems although I'm not sure.

You seem to be proposing combining all the drives into one big software
raid set or something.  My questions is do you really need that?
Separate drives and symlinks work very well in my experience and you can
change out a drive with minimal work.  Of course raid does offer
redundancy if you configure it that way, but well video storage isn't
that important to me.

I've heard XFS is the fastest for large files and I have used it from
time to time with JFS perhaps being more reliable.  I recently moved all
my server file systems to ext3 from reiserfs.  reiserfs doesn't save
much space, or speed if it is just mostly few hundred meg files and I
think it is slightly more reliable long term.  I'll probably use JFS I
guess for the big partition for myth to store things.

On Sat, 2005-09-10 at 13:31 -0400, Henry Fleischmann wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I'm setting up my first Mythtv system on Gentoo and had a question about 
> storage. What kind of problems will I run into if I base all my storage 
> for recorded programs, stored movies, MP3s, etc. on external USB or 
> firewire drives? For now I am putting my frontend and backend on the 
> same system (Asus Pundit-r 3Ghz, 200GB HD) which only has 1 HD bay but I 
> plan to move to separate frontend and backend setup if I find Mythtv and 
> I get along ok. External drives seem like a good solution due to ease of 
> expansion the ability to migrate them fairly easily to other systems.
> 
> Should I avoid I stick with one directory per drive and avoid JFS/XFS? 
> Is performance to low? Are their know problems with JFS or XFS on these 
> kinds of drives? If I add all the drives to one files system will the 
> spanned file systems be difficult to get back up on a different system 
> that recognize the drives in a different order than the original?
> 
> I am fairly familiar with JFS on SCSI drives using HP-UX (as of a couple 
> years ago) but have never used it on Linux or with IDE.
> 
> Thanks in advance!
> Henry
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