[mythtv-users] Network Drive Storage Questions and others.

Tue Sep 19 20:41:00 UTC 2006

Ok, so i'm REALLY starting to look into this and quickly.  Couple more
questions for all of you:

Debating between going hardware raid 5 and just a bunch of non raid disks.

I'll start with the questions:
1) Can you convert from Raid 1 (Mirroring) to Raid 5 without loosing/moving
the data?
2) Can you add disks to a Raid 5 without having to move data off the
Raid/Reconfigure the Raid (i.e. can you add the disk in place)
3) What Raid card would I want that is Fedora RedHat compatable (i'm not
against another distribution, I just know RedHat like the back of my hand
now) for HARDWARE raiding (software raid in Linux has caused me NO END of
troubles)...IDE or SATA would be fine...SATA pref.
4) If I go with simply a bunch of disks like mentioned above what kinds of
SATA Cards would I want to go with?  Anything to stay away from as far as
support through Linux/Fedora?
5) For HDTV, should I be looking at Gigbit Ethernet to appropriately stream
data over the network or can I get away with 100BT?

Here's the thing, at this point i'm looking at one or two drives but being
expandable in the future.  I'd like to go with a pair of 250g now
(potentially Mirrored) and add to that in the future to build up a raid
5...depending whether the wife feels like the data on the PVR is too good to
replace or not.

Obviously if the verdict is "Na, we can loose it" then i'll look at a
non-raid solution since frankly raid 5 is just expensive and Mirroring is
just stupid when you're talking about adding more disks in the future (have
to add in pairs).  Otherwise I need some kind of extendable solution...the
epotomy of which would be starting with 2 drives now and adding a drive at a
time in the future.

--Douglas Wagner

On 9/17/06, jack snodgrass <mrlinuxgroups at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/17/06, Douglas Wagner <douglasw0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Excelent information, i'll be replying more once I can consolidate and
> > process all of whats in here.
> >
> > As an FYI I am using HighDef, I have a pcHD3000 card in the box, but
> only
> > one tuner.  Don't see a huge need for a second tuner or to be recording
> more
> > than one thing at once, I'm not a huge TV buff, just enough that there
> are
> > some shows every season I just don't want to miss.  I have an NVidia
> 6200 in
> > there so ASSUMABLY XvMC is available, though i'm running a 2.8 HT Intel
> > processor and HD is still running slowly for me...not nearly as smooth
> as
> > through my TV and periodicly jumping/tearing...some stations have
> > audio/video out of sync issues as well (or did, havn't gotten anything
> into
> > .20 yet to see if that's been fixed).  Any sure way to tell if XvMC is
> > running or not?
>
> I did have a P4 3.0 HT CPU for my main desktop. It played HD
> fine ( with XvMC ). If I did other things ( like compiles ) the CPU
> got bogged down so I upgraded to a AMD 4600+ x86_64 CPU
> and moved the 3.0Ghz CPU to my NAS box.
>
> XvMC really lowers the CPU. If you run vlc with XvMC and it's
> not available, you don't get video. You can verify it that way.
> vlc is part of Video Lan Client
>
> I have a 6600GT with a fan. It runs hot even when it's not
> doing any graphics. I'm thinking about swapping in some
> non-fan'd video card to see if I can get good graphics
> and reduce the heat / noise.
>
> > As to the whole networked file system thing, what's this
> myth_archive_job.pl
> > script?  Is this included within the myth installation
> (/usr/share/mythtv
> > somewhere) or is this a put together thing I can find in the WIKI
> somewhere?
> >  I assume what this thing does is moves the physical data from one drive
> to
> > another drive before playback?
>
> it's in the crontib directory for svn. I assume that the contrib directory
> ships with the RPMs.  All it does is a mv from your /mnt/store directory
> to another directory... you can give the program a list of directories
> and it will find one with enough free space... and it makes a symbolic
> link from the new location to /mnt/store and that's all it needs to do.
>
> > I had always expected that I needed to have one huge LVM Partition
> mounted
> > to the frontend for this all to work, am I to understand some of you
> have
> > like /video1, /video2, /video3, partitions out there and simply simlink
> to
> > the various files from your /video partition?  Does MythArchiver work in
> a
> > situation such as this?
> >
>
> don't know... I assume it does.....
>
> > Can anyone go a bit more indepth into this kind of setup as to how this
> > somewhat works?  Having multiple drives non LVM all running seperate
> from
> > each other storing files would definately be my method of choice (can
> chose
> > to backup a given drive or not depending on the criticality of the
> data.)
> >
> > And while i've got some attention here, does anyone have a backup
> solution
> > that doesn't involve "Oh heck, i've just lost 2 years of programming
> because
> > my drive died." :)
> >
> > --Douglas Wagner
> >
>
> backups of HD shows are hard becuase of their size. You can go with
> DVD backups ( just write the .mpg to a dvd ) or you can rsync to a second
> box that has enough harddrive space.  I have multiple systems an I
> rsync data from 'important' directories between the multiple systems. I
> also rsync some data to remote systems.
>
> jack
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