[mythtv-users] Single WD GP disk fast enough for live 720p?

[Marius Schrecker]

 On Mon Nov 30 12:14 , 'Mark Garland' <mythtvusers at markgarland.co.uk> wrote:> I was considering spinning down the drive when Idle, although turning off
>> or redirecting enough logging is always a big job in Linux.
>> 
>> That could be why people have had problems with spindown. I would expect
>> that a drive that's constantly spinning up and down would suffer compared
>> to one that stays spinning when idle, especially a low-consuption disk
>> that should keep relatively cool when idle... on the other hand, with
>> logging properly reconfigured, having the drive able to stay down for most
>> of the day should be an advantage.
>
>The spin down wasn't really the issue, it was more the head-parking.
>After (a default) of 8 seconds, the drive would click as the heads park like
>a laptop drive and the power usage would drop by 3-4watts.
>As a media drive - this is great.  
>As a Linux system drive, this just didn't work.  Something would touch the
>drive every 10 seconds (I read somewhere that Linux buffers writes in this
>way but I don't have the knowledge to back that up).  You'd then get in a
>cycle - park, unpark, park, unpark, leading to a lot of people running an
>unsupported tool to disable the parking.  
>
>There's some very polarised opinions out there - some people claiming FUD,
>some people adamant that it shortens drives' lifespan.
>
>Check out http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php\?t=53110 for a
>thread I started back in March when figuring this out.  SPCR contains many
>other similar threads which should give you all the information you want.

>HTH,
>
>MG

____

Hmm!

 Bit of a B****er. The threads indicate that the behaviour can't be turned off in Linux using hdparm (on my  WD15EADS for example), and the  wdidle3 dos utility will invalidate the warranty.

:-(

Marius