Johnathon Meichtry wrote:
I agree, if its for a backend go for speed speed speed. Get the drive with the fastest RPM, the largest cache and fastest interface you can afford e.g. 7200rpm SATA. If possible get the fastest PCI-X SATA card you can find and you'll break the PCI bottleneck.
IMHO, more gigs are far more important than fast drives. Spend money on space, not on speed. (Also, RPM's and cache are only two of about 5 hard drive parameters that are required to determine the hard drive performance characteristics)
MPEG-2 streams don't take much bandwidth. A 10.8Mb/sec stream (the maximum allowed by the DVD specification--including audio and video) is 1,350,000 bytes per second (=1318KiB/sec=1.29MiB/sec). Since the PVR-x50's electronics will hit the quality ceiling far before that kind of bandwidth is required, you'll most likely use something like 4-6Mb/sec for "high-quality" recordings, meaning you'll using at most 60% of that, or about 0.75MiB/sec. If you use MPEG-4, you need even less bandwidth.
Even for high-definition, bandwidth isn't a problem. High-definition recordings seem to be between 4-10GiB/hr (averaging about 7GiB/hr), so taking the worst-case scenario (10GiB/hr), we have 2982616bytes/sec=2912KiB/sec=2.85MiB/sec. At this rate, you should be able to write several high-def streams concurrently even with "slow" hard drives.
Make sure it's UDMA66 or above (and you're unlikely to be able to find a new drive today that's not) and that you have an 80-wire IDE cable (if using PATA) and you'll be fine.
Mike _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
