[mythtv-users] Mythbackend recording glitches

[Stephen Worthington]

On Fri, 19 Oct 2018 13:58:57 -0700, you wrote:

>On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 1:09 AM Stephen Worthington <
>stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:
>
>Barring unforeseen problems, I am done.
>
>I have MythTV back again and no glitches, audio on Digital and Audio at the
>same time, basically everything is good.
>This is Mythbuntu 8 on a new 1T WD Blue drive. I read all the discussions
>about which drive to get and my old drive was a blue drive and it failed.
>But it lasted 10 years and it really seems like all these drives are
>probably the same but the red is just run slower which gives it longer
>life.  If it fails, I will get a Red and clone the old drive like I use did
>using Clonezilla.
>
>A word about the cloning.  I went from a 500G drive to a 1T drive.  I used
>a iso image on a DVD and booted off that with the two drives attached to
>the computer.  I checked Expert in the menu and checked option K1 which
>expended the partitions so that I am left with 916G on the root partition.
>I took about 2 hours. I have the old 500G installed as a backup so I won't
>lose my system in the event of a disk failure.  We don't save recordings
>past watching them so in the even to a disk failure, we would just end up
>watching some shows streaming.
>
>It was both interesting and frustrating trying to "upgrade" my old
>hardware. Perhaps if I bought some more memory it would have worked but it
>was just one more thing too many once I figured out how to stabilize the
>Mythbuntu 8 system.
>
>I installed the Mythbuntu 16 disk in the computer but of course it isn't
>usable without the 750 video card.  I had hoped to have it dual boot so my
>wife could watch the shows she taped in the last couple of weeks.  Maybe
>Mythbuntu 8 can run the 750 card and now that I have an image of the system
>perhaps it is worth trying.  Any opinions out there?  If it can, maybe I
>will buy the additional memory and see if the new system can be made to
>work if for no other reason than to share the experience.
>
>Thanks to all who helped me through this journey.  I truly appreciate it.
>
>I will leave with some words of wisdom:  "Never upgrade unless your system
>is broken"
>
>Allen

If there are only a few recordings that your wife wants to watch, you
can just add the directory they are in as a directory in the setting
that tells where the video files are and they will be able to be
played from there.  Or you can move them to a directory already in
that list.  The only problem with that is that they will have the not
very user friendly names for the files, but you can work out what they
are if there are not too many.  The file names have the chanid and the
timestamp of when they were recorded, and I have found that is enough
clues to be able to use them.

Back when your original blue drive was made, blue drives were over
engineered and tended to last well.  Modern WD Blue drives are not the
same.  They are engineered only well enough to do what they are
advertised to do.  So they are not suitable for 24/7 operation but are
intended for "desktop" operation where the PC is only on for an hour
or two a day and is kept switched off for the rest of the time.  So do
not expect a modern Blue drive to have a long lifetime.  The
equivalent Seagate drives are the same.  To get 24/7 operation, you
need to buy a drive rated for it, a "NAS" drive or better.

Please make sure you have SMART installed to monitor your drives (from
the "smartmontools" package), and have it set up to email you if it
detects drive problems.  That will normally give you the opportunity
to see the first problems with a drive and copy the data off to a new
drive before it fails.