[mythtv-users] Recording storage suggestions

[Jake Vickers]

Rich West wrote:
>
> Thanks for all of the suggestions.  LVM, as has been pointed out, does 
> add another layer, and concatenating volumes also adds another layer.  
> All of which are potential points of failure.
>
> As a stop-gap measure, I temporarily added my available 160GB drive to 
> the existing 160GB drive via LVM.  I figure I will be picking up a 
>  >320GB drive shortly, and migrating things over should be pretty easy.
>
> My question about performance was mainly because I didn't know if a 
> backend system  (3 tuners, possibly HDHR, and 3 frontends) would be able 
> to take advantage of the better performing disks, or if it was 
> over-kill/over-engineering...  However, I think it boils down to using 
> what I've got at hand since it makes it easier to sell the idea of 
> getting the HDHR + an antenna to my other half. :)
>
>   
I'm not fond of LVM myself. I had a single 200G in my Myth box that 
started to go bad. I threw in a 160G and copied over the new show I had 
just recorded off of a marathon I had not seen yet and sent the 200G 
back (love Seagate's warranty).
Anyway, I see that 500G's are down to $119, $105 if you use SATA, and if 
the drive goes bad and I lose everything, well crap, but it's just TV.
And as far as performance. I have a P4 2.4Celeron with 1G, a PVR-150 and 
a PVR-500 in it for my backend. I occasionally use all 3 tuners at the 
same time on my 2 frontends and don't notice any performance issues. The 
drive is a 7200RPM Seagate 160G. All machines are on a wired 100M network.
Hope that helps put some perspective on the performance issues.  This is 
just my setup, and YMMV.