[mythtv-users] Using firewire or usb external drives

[Henry Fleischmann]

Robert Denier wrote:

>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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>>    
>>
>
>  
>
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Thanks for the reply.

Sorry I wasn't clearer. You are correct that I had planned to use 
Logical Volume Manager to combine multiple physical disks into a single 
volume and put a single file system on the volume for all myth storage. 
Ultimately I would like to rip all my DVDs (150+) and store them here so 
storage could eventually exceed 1TB.