[mythtv-users] Guide data

[Gert van der Knokke]

Ian Forde wrote:

> Bruce Markey wrote:
>
>> In myth, the ringbuffer doesn't run all the time. The live buffer
>> is started when the player starts so if you ever exit, you lose
>> whatever had been recorded. It's better to record something and
>> watch the recording than to be stuck in the ringbuffer.
>
>
> Which, IMHO, is the reason that Tivo drives fail with a couple of 
> years... the ringbuffer is running *continuously*, thus writing to the 
> drive 24x7x365, as opposed to Myth and ReplayTV, where LiveTV is a 
> mode that can be gotten out of...
>
Hmm, and all the harddisks that are used in normal PC's and/or servers 
on 24h a day ?
They have to endure much more head activity than a smooth linear writing 
Tivo keeping up its ringbuffer.
Since the heads don't touch the disks there is (virtually) no wear.
Furthermore the amount of data per second is quite low and so the drive 
will fill the write cache before actually doing something.
My backend/fileserver is constantly doing all kinds of things (and even 
Linux itself is doing all kinds of stuff in the background involving 
disk activity), even smartd is running and so the drive will perform 
selftest (requiring head movement).

IDE drives can start/stop when idle but have a limited (large!) amount 
of start/stop cycles, SCSI drives normally run 24h/day without problems 
(most manufacturers don't even mention start/stop cycles for SCSI).

So all in all I don't think a drive of a tivo will fail faster than a 
drive used in any other PC. (maybe in a normal PC it runs a bit cooler..)

Gert