It has been several years since I've run a laptop drive in a desktop system, and then only to see if it worked, but if its an ide drive as far as I know you simply need a special cable. Now undoutably ide drives either laptop or desktop continue to improve so I suspect a new laptop drive would be fast enough. It looks like the top mpeg2 data rate for a 250 card is around 12Mb/sec or 1.5MB/sec. Now just about any drive should handle that these days, but you run into the problem that if your are delaying live tv then it has to at least double that + deal with all the seeking.

At a quck glance at laptop hard drives on newegg a fujitsu 100GB, 4200rpm notebook drive runs 193.89 and has a 12ms seek and 8MB buffer.
A 300GB 5400 rpm normal hard drive ( 2MB cache) is $199. It has a 10ms seek time. (I'd tend to recommend the 8MB cache drives, but this is just for comparison.)


As you can see the seek times are close, but the capacities are quite a bit different. Personally I'd think it would work given the numbers unless you using poorly compressed Rtjpeg compression or something. Is 100GB enough space for your myth recordings though? If you needed 2 drives, you'd pretty much cancel out any savings you might want.. Then again you also need to find the adaptor cable for the small drive and a way to mount it inside a desktop case.

Personally I doubt its worth it, unless you absolutely need the size. I would look at the power requirements of the 3.5" drives though. 5400 rpm drives used to use less power than 7200, but I'm not sure if you can go by that anymore. You can also use rounded ide cables or Sata drives if your motherboard and linux supports it. (Getting Sata to work in linux might be additional work..) The main thing is to keep air moving in a case..

One other note about a small drive being better cooled. In order to cool correctly the drive needs to be physically mounted to the metal housing to transfer at least part of the heat that way. This would likely require a 3.5 inch to 2.5 inch metal adapter. I haven't even looked as to their availability, but I suppose you could make one. At any rate the point being, that you will likely tie up the space available whichever drive you use...

If you haven't already found it there is power saving code in the linux kernel for various CPU's that run the processor's slower. (2.6 series at least.) I don't use it, but its more a matter of not taking the time to get it working.


David Whyte wrote:

I think the problem with most laptop drives is they are slow.  They
run at around 4200rpm to save power.  I don't know if this would be
considered slow, I think it would, but how it impacts myth, I don't
know.

Whytey


On Mon, 31 Jan 2005 01:13:10 -0500, Maverick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


Hey all,

 I've had a myth box for a couple weeks running KnoppMyth v4r5 and
have enjoyed it alot. Unfortunatly, the drive I used is getting more
and more bad blocks, and now they're starting to cause kernel panics
when mythbackend trys to commercial detect and watch live tv, etc. It
was a "bad" drive to begin with, but it's what I had to build myself a
proof of concept box. Of course, I fell in love w/ myth and moved all
my recordings from my ReplayTV to it. DOH! Anyway...

Question is: Can I buy a 2.5" Laptop IDE drive and use it in my
(normal desktop) system? I've never used small HD's in non-laptop
systems before, anyone have any advice, pages to read, etc? My main
motive is sound, and I'm also packed into a small case, so I figure a
small HD would be better cooled and much quieter. Is it worth the
extra $$ for the small drive?

Any experience / suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

-Kenneth


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