[mythtv-users] thoughts on a combined backend/NAS box?

[Matt Emmott]

On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 1:55 AM, GZ <gzornetzer.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Any advice or thoughts are welcomed.
> Thanks very much,
> -Greg
>
>
I'm running a virtualized backend on a $300 Dell Poweredge I bought on
ebay. My tuners are external and I haven't had any issues specific to the
fact that it's a VM. What's really nice is that when it's time for a major
upgrade, I can run a snapshot ahead of time in case the upgrade causes an
issue - This saved my butt going from 10.04 to 12.10 a while back (Keep in
mind I am an idiot when it comes to Linux).

My storage is an XServe RAID connected by fiber and not really applicable
to your scenario. I will say that once you go over 2TB disks, your chances
of having a URE (Unrecoverable Read Error) during a rebuild increase
substantially. I'm a sys admin and over the past 19 years, I've seen three
RAID5 rebuilds fail. Two of them were in the past year.  Here's a very
precient article back from 2007 that really illustrates the point:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162.

I myself have been looking for a while for some kind of external enclosure
to hook to my PowerEdge, but fiber to nearline SATA drive enclosures are
just insanely expensive. I'm leaning towards (sorry in advance guys) a
Windows Server 2012 box running as an iSCSI target. But I haven't totally
decided just yet.
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