[mythtv-users] RAID suggestions?

Matthew Daubenspeck matt at oddprocess.org
Thu Oct 25 14:23:27 UTC 2007


On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 09:24:31AM -0400, Greg Arena wrote:
> 	I just recently bought a trio of 500 GB SATA hard disks
> that I want to put together in a RAID 5 configuration for my
> MythTV box. These will only be used for storing recordings &
> videos - I have an 80GB PATA drive in place that I'll keep there
> for the OS, MythTV software, logs, etc. I plan to use Linux's
> software RAID support - true hardware RAID was just too
> expensive.
> 	I've heard mixed reports about using RAID 5 for media
> stuff. The MythTV wiki doesn't recommend it without expensive
> hardware RAID controllers, but yet I've heard people talking
> about their RAID 5 setups on this list and elsewhere. I was
> wondering if anybody has gotten something similar working and
> what settings they used (stripe size, etc.) since I've never set
> up a RAID before. I've already run some benchmarks using bonnie++
> with one drive by itself to use for comparison after setting up
> the RAID to try to make sure it's not going to degrade
> performance excessively. I'm willing to spring for another hard
> disk to go to a four-disk RAID 10 configuration if RAID 5 looks
> like it'll be too slow.
> 	I'm also considering using XFS for the file system for
> storing all the media files on this RAID. Any suggestions on how
> to optimize it for RAID 5 or RAID 10? I've never used anything
> but ext3 for my Linux boxes until now, so I'm new to XFS as well.
> 	Of course, since I'm new to RAID and XFS, I'm not going
> to put the RAID online until I'm sure it'll perform well and
> reliably - I definitely plan to experiment before I shift the
> handful of recordings & videos I've squeezed onto my current Myth
> partition over to the new RAID.

I've been using a linux software RAID5 setup for years on my myth box
with no problems. I also serve video, mp3s, and images from the same
array. I'm currently using 3, 250G SATA 3.0 drives with little or no
speed issues (that I have seen). I have nothing but a modest server: AMD
Athlon 64 Processor 2800+ 1.8GHz with 2GB of RAM. I currently have 1
PVR500 and a PVR150 and even with all 3 tuners recording at once, I've
never noticed any skipping or jumping. I cam show you CPU usage graphs
if you want :)

-- 
  Matthew Daubenspeck
  http://oddprocess.org

Gentoo Linux x86_64 Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 165
10:18:47 up 97 days, 14:08, 5 users, load average: 0.02, 0.01, 0.00


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