[mythtv-users] Wake up disks on events
Jon Boehm
boehm100 at comcast.net
Thu Aug 21 00:07:00 UTC 2008
mythtv at blandford.net wrote:
> Hello,
>
> This is a little off topic, but I am hopeful I will get some good ideas.
>
> I have a few mythtv frontends running minimyth as well as a fedora 9
> backend+frontend combination.
>
> I use hdparm to spin down the mythtv disks when they are not in use.
>
> This is working really well for the most part. The power consumption of
> my server goes from 185W to 130W when the disks spin down.
>
> When I power on a frontend and watch a show, it takes 10-15 seconds for
> the disks in the backend to spin up. this causes the frontend to appear
> to freeze.
>
> What I would like to do is add some hooks to help control the disks.
> It might be a single daemon or just cobble several things together.
>
> Here were my thoughts:
>
> 1) A frontend hook to notify the server to wake up the disks. The
> frontend could ping a certain port on the server, or touch a file on the
> server to notify it was awake. The disks will wake up in the time it
> takes the TV to warm up.
>
> 2) Wake up 1 minute prior to recording any shows. I miss 10-15 seconds
> now. I don't want to tell mythtv to record an extra minute early
> because it causes show overlaps in the scheduler.
>
> 3) Check the upcoming recordings and keep the disks spinning if another
> show is starting with X minutes. Don't spin down the disks if they are
> used again soon.
>
> 4) Schedule the database optimize, myth_rename, updatedb, etc
> immediately after the last recorded show of the day so the disks won't
> wake up in the early morning to run those tasks.
> .
>
> Has anyone else done something like this or do you have suggestions on
> any of these?
>
> Michael
>
I use cron to set my drives to spin down after 20 min between the hours
of 1am and 7:30pm. The majority of my programs are recorded during
primetime and my viewing is usually during this time also. On off hours
recordings, I notice a video glitch about 5 seconds into the recording,
like a buffer overflow as the drive spins up.
Eventually I would like to use the serial comm connection to my AV
receiver to trigger drive spin up. I don't know enough about Linux and
serial ISRs yet to do this.
Jon
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