[mythtv-users] NAS RAID 5 for MythTv

[Brian Wood]

On Feb 6, 2007, at 6:53 AM, Jeffery Swan wrote:

> I am just finishing up a 1.5 TB RAID 5 NAS via the free NAS (http:// 
> www.freenas.org/). With my limited knowledge of how MythTv accesses  
> the disk(s) I have the following question / suggestion.
>
> When a front end requests a movie does the backend find it (via  
> MySql) and then stream it or does it pass this information to the  
> front end? In other words does the backend do some "processing" of  
> the data and then stream it to the front end?
>
> If this is how it works (and I am assuming it is) I am thinking  
> that to reduce network traffic, I should put the NAS on a seperate  
> subnet. If the myth tv backend(s) have two NICs each with one NIC  
> dedicated to the NAS subnet and the other for the front ends the  
> network traffic should be much more stream lined.
>
> Please send your comments and suggestions.
>

I'm trying to figure out what the advantage of your setup is. It  
appears to me that freenas can't do anything that any Linux machine  
could not do, and Linux can at present support all of the "planned"  
features of freenas.

It would seem that any case capable of holding 1.5TB of drives would  
be an ATX case and any mobo that went into that case could run Linux  
and would have way more than 32MB of RAM as I don't think you can  
even buy DIMMs that small anymore.

It might be interesting to run in under VMWare as they suggest, but  
the speed penalty would seem to be extreme, and you'd still need to  
dedicate a case for the drives.

The user manual is a bit vague on the H/W requirements as it says  
simply "a PC", which I assume to mean an x86 machine.

So I guess I'm asking why you chose to use freenas instead of a Linux  
system to do your NAS chores?

  This is certainly topical as every Myth user has large storage  
requirements and if freenas does offer some advantage it would be  
good to know about it.