[mythtv-users] Experience with external (firewire or usb) hard drives?

Tim Tait t.tait at comcast.net
Mon Aug 2 14:33:49 EDT 2004


 
Joseph A. Caputo wrote:

>On Monday 02 August 2004 13:18, Nathan Richardson wrote:
>  
>
>>How much success has userland had with using external hard drives
>>with Myth? I'm planning on using a fast internal drive for the
>>live-tv buffer and an external Firewire box for storage of recordings
>>and encoding.
>>
>>Anyone have any idea if this will work without recording or playback
>>errors? I also plan to access the firewire drives from another PC (it
>>will be used as general audio/video/data storage for my whole
>>apartment), but nothing else should be playing or recording video to
>>it. The drives in the firewire case are decently fast - 2 160gb
>>Maxtor 7200 RPM 8mb cache drives.
>>
>>There is at least one thread in this list that mentions problems with
>>a firewire drive, but the problems mentioned there seem to have to do
>>with livetv playback. Has anyone had experience with using firewire
>>for recordings?
>>
>>If not, do you have a random guess / back-of-envelope calculation for
>>whether this would work acceptably well?
>>    
>>
>
>I have an external FireWire/USB enclosure (using the FW connection, not 
>USB) with a 120GB 7200RPM WD drive in it.  I don't use it for Myth 
>recordings or LiveTV, but I do use it for MythVideo rips & my MythMusic 
>collection.  I'd image you'd have similar performance issues playing 
>back Myth recordings as with playing back MPEG-4 .avi files (unless 
>you're recording in MPEG-2, in which case the throughput requirements 
>would be greater).  I've had no problems with performance.
>
>-JAC
>
Don't laugh at me but I've been running a 200GB seagate IDE drive in an 
external USB2.0 enclosure for all the video storage and it seems work 
fine so far. I've only got one PVR250MCE though. I'm thinking of doing a 
USB (R)AID0 array:)

Tim






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