On Thursday 27 October 2005 13:02, Brandon Beattie wrote: > On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 05:07:50PM +0100, Alexander Fisher wrote: > > Other hints ... > > Don't put more than one ide drive on a single ide channel. A failing > > drive often takes out the bus. SATA drives make sense, but SMART > > support for SATA is still under development. You should also make > > sure that your SATA chipset has got linux support! > > Do you have any references about this? I've never seen this happen in > about 50 drives I've seen fail. .. The only time I've seen more than 1 > drive go out at once is due to an electrical problem in the system. > I've seen ruined drives on the same power cable, power supply, but not > the same IDE channel. > > SATA doesn't offer any performance that I see worthwile in a media box. > Having a single disk on an IDE port only helps if you're accessing two > drives at once. Although this can happen in a media box, Myth doesn't > need it. If you want to do it for fun that's one thing, but it's really > not needed. As I've said before, I've saved 5 35Mb/s streams and watched > 1 20Mb/s stream on a single 7200 RPM drive. Myth buffers data when > storing to maximize storing to the FS. I've pushed 99MB/s read and > 65MB/s write to 4 drives (Using only motherboard ide channels). That's > the equiv of 40 1080i streams read or writing 26HD streams at once > (Theoretical). If you're going to be recording more than 8-10 HD > streams at once, or pushing 10+ HD streams to frontends then you may > want to start _thinking_ about SATA. If you're doing SD then the > numbers I'd say would be 20 saving and 30 playback... (You'll max > network before having problems reading from a single drive). Also, in > my testing, It was something like 10% slowdown when doing raid 0 > striping and using two drives on the same ide channel. However, if we > figure one drive gives us 100%, two drives give us 200%, then 10% loss > gives us 180% throughput, so you'll get more throughput if you put two > drives on the same channel rather than not using it at all. > > SATA is good, but it's overkill. SATA really shines if you're striping > drives, then it's very helpful to have it on it's own channel. There's > no reason though that 99% of people should ever stripe drives for a Myth > box. I did it for 6 months, it was fun to benchmark and show off. > However, your system is only as fast as the slowest point. I've found > in HTPC's that your root partition and its FS, or the FS with the myth > database on it make a more noticeable effect on usability. XFS(best), > then JFS, then Reiser4, then ReiserFS, then ext2, then ext3(worst) make > a large difference. Brand of drives also makes a large difference (All > my Seagate drives run 15%-40% faster depending on the tests I run, over > the Maxtor ones I have). I ran most all my tests on Maxtor's using XFS > as for how many streams I could push. > > I currently have 4 HD tuners and 2 frontends in my MythBox. I often > record 4 shows at once and while watching another. I've chosen to go > with LVM for my 6 drives and 1.3TB of data. I also picked ReiserFS (Not > reiser4, XFS, or JFS) because I've found shrinking a FS to be very > useful when dealing with a mythBox. Since ReiserFS is really the only > FS that supports shrinking with LVM, I use it, even though it's the > worst performing for throughput. I've never had a single problem with > disk throughput. It's an AMD 2500, 512MB ram (It never uses over 120MB > unless it's commercial detecting, then it will use 300MB's). > > Point is, if you're on a budget, there's no need to pay extra for > "fastest" or "best" unless you're in a pissing contest. I only > recommend paying more for reliability and suggest people get seagate > drives with a 5 yr warranty, and accept they will be faster and quieter > than maxtor, Western Digital, or other brands of HD's. > > --Brandon
well, right now, newegg sells the WD3200JD/JB 320GB SATA and ATA100 drves, with roughly a $5 difference at $130. its slightly slower, and <1db louder than the seagate drives, but also much much cheaper. It also only has a 3yr warranty, but I personally have never kept a large storage drive in ciritical use areas for even this length of time, they've either failed a SMART test or were replaced by larger drives. 2 years ago I was using a bunch of 120gig drives, replace 3 of those with 1 new drive now, I assume a similar if not accelerated situation will continue to occur. though a RAID 5 SATA controller is about $50 more than an ATA100 one. But if this is not a concern for you then SATA is not that bad of an option and I've found it runs wonderfuly on my nForce board. Steve _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
