[mythtv-users] My First MythTV Box

[R. G. Newbury]

match at ece.utah.edu wrote:
> On 30 Dec 2007 at 19:54, lists at benzo8.org wrote:
> 
>>> On Dec 30, 2007 1:01 AM, John Sullivan <lists at benzo8.org> wrote:
>>>> RAM             2 x DIMM 1 Gb DDR2 800 MHZ KINGSTON HYPER-X
>>>> HD 1            HDD 80 Gb 7200 RPM SATA II
>>>> HD 2            HDD 250 Gb 7200 RPM SATA II
>>> I dont know much about DVB but if  I was you i would save some money on
>>> RAM.  1 Gig is plenty.  I would go with 2 512mb sticks to get dual
>>> channel.
>>> With the extra money I would get some more storage!  Are you buying a
>>> 80Gig
>>> HDD?  Or is that a left over that you have?  500GB are only $100 USD  I
>>> would get atleast one.
>> Thanks for the advice - I'll shift some funds from memory to HDD - upgrade
>> the 250GB to a 500GB... I'll be buying all the drives new, but I was
>> thinking that the 80GB is just a systems/DB disc and so doesn't need large
>> amounts of space - am I mistaken?
> 
> You're not necessarily mistaken, but an 80GB drive just makes no sense at 
> all. Look at it this way: 
> 
> 1. You only have a few physical spaces in the box to mount HDD's, so if 
> you're going to have 2, then have 2 large ones. You'll never regret having the 
> additional storage space.
> 
> 2. That 80GB drive will make about the same amount of noise and consume 
> about the same amount of power and hence generate about the same 
> amount of heat as the 500GB.
> 
> 3. At this time I don't see much value in having the system/DB on a separate 
> disk, do you?
> 
> So, if I were you I'd buy a pair of the biggest disks I could find a good deal 
> on. Look at all the drives available to you, eliminate any that are excessively 
> noisy, and choose whichever will get you the most GB per dollar (or pound, 
> or ruble, or whatever) from the remaining list. Last time I did this, it was 
> 400GB Seagates for $69 each... YMMV.
> 
> Everyone's recording habits are different, but personally I feel that for an SD 
> system, 700GB of program storage is about right. More is overkill, but 700GB 
> is large enough that you won't be worrying about running out, and there's 
> room for a few movies and some music.
> 
> If you're going HD (I didn't see your original post) or think you ever will, then 
> 4 times this much storage is about right IMNSHO. Personnally I have actually 
> cut back from 5.5TB to 3.7TB total.
> 
> Yeah, some on this list feel I have more GB than needed, others have more 
> in their systems than I do. When it comes down to brass tacks, only you can 
> decide what's best for you, but I can assure you... at some point you are 
> going to wonder why you even bothered with that 80GB drive.

My opinion is the opposite: I have a separate drive for the OS and the 
hard drives which have the video are one partition only. At the moment 
the OS drive is actually a 13g IDE, while the video drives are 120 and 
250G SATA. I was using about 40Gig on the 120 drive for the OS and 
running out of space....so I swapped in a 40G laptop drive on an adapter 
and took the opportunity to upgrade to Fedora 8 and do a complete 
upgrade. When that was running, I recovered the space on the 120G drive.

I *think* that I have everything set up correctly, and the 2 SATA drives 
spool down when not in use. That left the system with only the laptop 
drive running continuously. (In order to use the 40G drive to transfer a 
bunch of recordings, I later swapped in a 13G 3.5" IDE drive...13G is a 
little small and really leaves me no room for backups. I have to use 
some space on one of the video drives for the mysqlbackup etc...)

So YMMV,, it really could depend on whether you have room in the case 
for the extra drive(s)...And you will not berate yourself for getting 
*large* hard drives for storage....

Geoff