[mythtv-users] Problems with External USB Drives

[Jonno]

On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 10:59 AM, Jonno <jonnojohnson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 4:22 PM, Jonno <jonnojohnson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Well I finally had chance to get it defrag'd and changed the
>> allocation size to 512m. I had to change my /etc/fstab entry to mount
>> via the UUID rather than the /dev/sdb1 notation that I had been using
>> since it was now showing up as sdd1 (not sure why that changed).
>> Before I did all this I took the drive out and attached it directly to
>> the motherboard of my desktop system and ran Spinrite at level 2. It
>> found no problems other than seek errors.
>>
>
> So far so good though it's only been a couple of days. I also set the
> defrag to run as a cron job in the middle of the night and this
> morning the frag level had dropped from 11% back down to 3% so things
> are looking promising.
>


Well although my hdd hasn't been freezing up much, I was still
experiencing blocky pictures and messed up sound every so often.  I
tried switching the storage to some space on the internal, system hdd
and I've had no problems at all. Seems like something is definitely up
with the external hdd when working with Mythtv but I have no idea
what. I tried re-formatting but still had problems. I ran badblocks on
it and it didn't come it with a single problem. Spinrite says no
problems. Also xfs_repair came up with nothing. I guess I'm gonna get
a new drive for my recordings.

So my question for the list before I go ahead and buy another drive
is, what is the best setup for storage? I have an eSATA port so I was
thinking of using a 750GB external eSATA drive. Should I be looking at
a multi-drive RAID setup? I've never done anything with RAID and I'm a
linux noob so it scares me a tad.