[mythtv-users] Backend hardware advice

John Drescher drescherjm at gmail.com
Sat Jul 8 15:05:06 UTC 2006


On 7/8/06, Paul Simpson <paul at maggiandpaul.dnsalias.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Like a lot of people, I'm looking at putting together a Myth system for as
> little cash as possible!
>
> I'm looking at having a dedicated backend and about half a dozen front
> ends around the house all linked with Gigabit Ethernet.
>
> For the backend, what's the best storage to go for? SATA or PATA? What are
> the benefits for the cost of SATA?


I would go with SATA, its slightly faster, does not have a cost premium and
provides
much better wiring and cooling properties as the cable runs are much less
likely to
harm good air flow through the case.


I'm thinking of going hardware Raid5


This I would not do. I mean real hardware cards cost as much as 3 320BG
drives and do
not provide as good of a software support for monitoring, resizing, and
maintanance as you
get with the builtin linux software raid. Also only the very expensive
hardware RAID cards will
outperform software raid as when you think of it most hardware raid cards
have a 100MHz to
300Mhz proccessor on the board to do the parity generation now compare that
performance
with any of todays processors...


and want as much potential space as possible. What controller cards are
> people using for this?


If you get a mobo with pcix slots I highly recommend promise a sx8 card. I
have several at
work and they work very well and they also work with sata hot plugging which
I have had to
use a few times to hot swap out a bad drive from a 2TB raid 6 array using 10
X 250GB WD 16
MB cache sata disks...


What about drives?

Being that I have built several linux raid servers ~5 to 7 TB of raid 6 in
the last two years I and tried drives from
maxtor, western digital, and seagate and in my opinion the new seagate
7200.10 320 GB drives are the best.

I'm thinking of having a

> seperate drive for swap (and boot if the raid card doesn't support it).


I used to do this but I find it better (more reliable) to use linux software
raid with partitions.
Create a seperate raid 1 array for boot (all drives in the system will
mirror a small 256MB array).
Place the swap on all disks. And then make a 40 GB raid (5 or 6 but I prefer
6) array for / and then
create a 3rd raid (again 5 or 6) array for the rest. On this final array use
lvm so you can have ultimate
flexibility with your storage space.


Then there are cases, I'd like to go rack-mount if possible.
>
> I'm in the UK and also looking for suppliers.
>
> Advice gratefully accepted.
>
> --
> Paul
>
>
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