[mythtv-users] advise/suggestions on how to set up my drives?

[R. G. Newbury]

On 03/22/2010 11:12 PM, Steven Adeff wrote:
> So I'm building a box for my parents. It will have one QAM PCI tuner
> and two firewire connected cable boxen (possibly one/two via HDPVR
> depending on what channels they can record over firewire). We've
> bought three 1.5tb SATA drives and I'm wondering how I should set them
> up to host as recordings space and media space (music, dvd rips, etc)
> to maximize speed for recording and space for both?
>
> Thanks for the help folks!

This topic has been thrashed to death in at least three different 
threads over the past couple of months.
Best go to gossamer-threads, and search the list archives. A good search 
term would involve 'partition'.

The short answer is that you really want a small drive for the OS and 
large drives for the video store. You want the OS and mysql database on 
a different spindle (ie drive) from the video. You need different 
optimization for the OS (many small files) and the video partitions (a 
few really large files). So the OS can be on ext3/4, while the video 
should be something like xfs with an allocsize=512M setting.

You only need about 16G for the OS on a straight mythbox. If you use an 
SSD drive, there are further optimizations for all of the OS partitions. 
And there are optimizations for where/how certain things are set up 
among the partitions used for the OS (including /tmp, /var and swap usage).

This *can* be done on with partitions on a very large drive, but at some 
point, you will end up with the system attempting to write database 
entries on one partition, and video onto another partition, on the same 
spindle...which is not good.

Geoff

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