[mythtv-users] 1TB USB $225 US

[Mark Knecht]

On Feb 11, 2008 9:47 AM, Anthony R. Baker <baker at low-e.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Feb 11, 2008 8:08 AM, Mark Knecht <markknecht at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Feb 11, 2008 6:28 AM, Anthony R. Baker <baker at low-e.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> >
> > >     Does anyone think this wouldn't work for a standard def. system
> > > Iomega 1TB Double USB 2.0 Desktop Hard Drive promo price $225.95
> > >
> > > Anthony R. Baker
> > >
> >
> > I use only 400mb/S 1394 storage on two different backend server. It
> > has always worked well for me. I would have no worries about trying
> > USB. It will likely work out fine.
> >
> > Hope this helps,
> > Mark
> >
>
> >Actually, it dawned on me that my local MythTV server is actually
> >using USB2.0 as storage, not 1394. I use 1394 at a remote location
> >only. The local server is two PVR-150 tuners. We often have two
> >recordings happening while at the same time we have 3 people watching
> >different programs on different TVs. I've never had a problem with the
> >system that I could attribute to the disk drives being 'slow'. We've
> >got about 18 months on this USB drive.
>
> >If I was looking at HDTV recording then I would have to revisit
> >whether this makes sense but for our backend needs it's been fine.
>
> >Again, I hope this helps,
> >Mark
>
>     It does I've set up my setup 3 times now because of hardware and while
> it seemed like a no-brainer so did some of the other problems I had. One of
> the reasons I was thinking of this was to keep the heat in my system down. I
> have 2 300GB SATA drives in it now with mythdora on one and storage on the
> other. I have most of the free space on the first drive on its own partition
> and could let disk manager add it to storage but haven't been forced to
> yet.With a usb drive added I would think mounting it to /storage/videos
> would be the right thing but should/can I reformat or leave it Fat32?
>
>
I think either is OK but personally I have used a Linux file system
type myself. Note that as it's currently set up I wasn't able to get
the Myth frontend working on my Windows box but decided it wasn't of
enough interest to warrant making any changes. IIRC Windows wanted to
see the drive as a Samba share or something and I didn't feel like
doing the work to try and make that work. If I was going to try again
I might load an ext3 driver on the Windows machine and see if I could
read the drive that way. I already do that with ext3 partitions on my
dual boot machines.

Everyone watches Myth across a 54Mb/S wireless link. We don't have
many problems so I don't know why folks would be high on Gigabit
networking. I'm probably not smart enough to see the reason. If I did
the calculations correctly SD TV uses about 2GB/hour of recording so
streaming that takes about 4.4Mb/S. We stream 3 of those at a time
using maybe 25% of the max wireless bandwidth. It seems to work and
isn't overly bothered by other things happening on the network. I
trade stocks for a living and can stream real time stock data to two
platforms and watch MythTV live. I seldom see any bandwidth issues and
when I do it seems that it's caused by other wireless networks in the
area and not by stuff on mine, or so I think.

/video is the drive you are interested in:

dragonfly ~ # df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda8              9621848   4107976   5025096  45% /
udev                     10240       304      9936   3% /dev
/dev/hda2             50394996  47714768    120272 100% /Musiclib
/dev/hda3             30233928  23557664   5140452  83% /home
/dev/hda6              3020140   1600712   1266012  56% /usr/src
/dev/hda9              9621848   7491836   1641236  83% /usr/portage
/dev/hda10             2893628    992660   1753976  37% /var
none                    249760         0    249760   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda3             71038844  35827320  31602924  54% /video
dragonfly ~ #

dragonfly ~ # cat /etc/fstab | grep sda3
/dev/sda3		/video		ext3		noatime			0 0
dragonfly ~ #

Note that this is just one 80GB partition on a larger and somewhat
older 1394/USB drive. 40 hours of recording is enough for us as mainly
we just time shift SD television.

Cheers,
Mark