[mythtv-users] 2 TB Hard Drive Recommendations

[Kevin Ross]

On 12/07/2010 10:44 AM, jmk wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-12-07 at 06:54 -0800, Craig Cook wrote:
>> +1 vote for 2TB WD20 Green drives, with a caution note.
> OK, so something like the WD20EARS should be fine as long as I have the
> latest mdadm and gdisk...
>
> It's currently a toss up for me between the WD20EARS and the Hitachi
> HDS722020ALA330. The later is 7200 RPM and appears to avoid the various
> issues (4K, TLER, etc), but will cost an extra $120 for three drives.
> Decisions, decisions...
>
> Thanks for the info.
>
> Joe

FWIW, I have 2 WD10EARS drives, along with 3 WD10EADS drives, in a RAID5 
array.  I needed to fiddle with fdisk to get the partitions started on a 
4K boundary.  By default, fdisk wants to start a partition at sector 63, 
which is obviously not on a 4K boundary, and would cause performance 
degradation if left like that.

I haven't had any problems with the WD drives in my array.  Also, these 
drives have been fast enough for MythTV.  I sometimes record up to 4 HD 
shows at once, while watching from a frontend, while commflagging, and 
haven't had problems with the drives not being able to keep up.  I do, 
however, keep my MySQL database on a separate drive.