[mythtv-users] OT: which NAS-appliance can you recommand

[Joe Votour]

>
> On Apr 2, 2007, at 8:46 AM, Fedor Pikus wrote:
>
>> On 4/2/07, Yann Lehmann <aristide at tiscali.ch> wrote:

<snip>

>
> That sounds like good advice.
>
> The first question I would ask the OP is how many videos he is
> planning to pull off /put on the device, and are any of them HD?
>
> The little NSLU2s (aka slugs) can be had really cheap, but they are
> not fast enough to do more than 1 or possibly 2 SD files at a time,
> and I don't think I'd try HD with one, but they are cheap.
>
> Just about any old cheap PC can be used to NFS mount drives onto your
> network. You can literally get them for almost nothing these days.
>
> But if power consumption, noise or heat is a factor one of the
> smaller solutions is perhaps worth the cost.
>
> Brian Wood
> beww at beww.org
>

I think the question really depends on the definition of "outsource".  It
could just mean "move the videos on to it when finished watching them", or
it could mean actually using it as a real-time backend.

I don't really recommend using a NAS as a real-time backend - it may have
the "oopmh" (although I'm sure that there's a couple of people doing it
already), but there's a lot of things that can go wrong and you might not
know it unless you really pay attention.

My dedicated MythTV backend is up 24/7, so I take advantage of that.  In
addition to the backend, I also run my software RAID file server (which is
not the storage for MythTV), and a local e-mail server which pulls down
all of my accounts via POP3 and gives me a pretty little web interface for
them.

The other thing to watch out for with these NAS boxes is that they may not
be able to keep up with recording multiple streams at once.  My backend,
an Athlon64 3500+ with 512MB (at that time) using software RAID-5 could
not keep up with two HD and one SD recording, when writing them all to the
software RAID-5 array.  That could have been due to me using an older
version of the ivtv driver (0.4.x, which doesn't handle DMA too well), so
I'd get MPEG-2 errors in the resulting SD (and maybe even HD) streams. 
(The ivtv driver would also regularly crap out, but the system still
remained functional.)  Something else that I noticed is that a degraded
array can really kill performance even further.


Since putting the MythTV recordings on a dedicated drive running XFS, my
problems have gone away.  I also later bumped up the memory in the backend
to 2GB, which may have helped with recording to RAID-5 as well (but I'm
not trying it again to find out).

My advice, if the OP is looking to archive shows, or have a big pool of
storage: Record them on the backend (not in a software RAID array), and
transfer them to the NAS at a non-critical time.

-- Joe


_________________________________________________________________
Need personalized email and website? Look no further. It's easy
with Doteasy $0 Web Hosting! Learn more at www.doteasy.com