[mythtv-users] MythTV as a Gift (Hardware Recommendations)

[Bill Omer]

On Jan 23, 2008 9:41 AM, Brian Phillips <brian.phillips at gmx.net> wrote:
> Bill Omer wrote:
>
> > Actually, there is one more thing.  What about a hard drive to load
> > the OS and run the database off of?  I would recommend not running
> > the system and db off the same partition for storage.
>
> Why?  I am pretty new at this mythtv thing and my playback (livetv or
> recordings) are sluggish when the db is being updated or queried
> (mythfilldatabase, program guide, mythweb listings, etc).  I always thought
> it was the processor bottleneck (p3 550).
>
> Could it be that my hard drive is the bottleneck?  Or are you recommending
> separate partitions just to preserve data integrity (ease of backups,
> rebuilds, etc) ?
>

The main reason I recommend not having the OS and storage on the same
drive is if that drive dies, now you loose everything.  Where as if
you had them separated, it's a little easier to recover.  I do nightly
backups of my database and store it on both my system disk as well as
my storage disk.  This way if I loose the system disk, it's an easy
recover.  The problem is I can't recover from a drive crash on my
storage though, which is why using raid0 would be a good idea.

The argument is always "It's just TV", but I'm sure I'm not the only
one on this list that has lost all of their shows and felt the pain of
a massive drop in WAF.

So if you are going to have a pair of 750's, if it were me, I would
put them in a raid0 for redundancy.  That's still a hell of a lot of
space, and could survive a crash, too.

The problem though is with the case only supporting two drives, that's
a big limiting factor.  Since you can only use two, then I would still
get the two 750's and on the first drive make a partition for the os
and swap, then one partition for myth recordings and another for misc
media.  The entire second drive then could be used for myth storage.

The media partition should have a directory for pictures, videos and
music.  Then you can use samba to share those directories so you can
add files to be viewed in myth.



*one key thing to note here is that using multiple directories to
store recordings is an option only available in SVN.