[mythtv-users] Setting up MythTV in a wierd way ...

Brad Templeton brad+myth at templetons.com
Wed Jan 5 20:34:45 EST 2005


On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 05:00:00PM -0800, Matt Picker wrote:
> I'm no seasoned pro myself but I would go with the
> external scsi solution.  You can usually find a scsi
> card and an external enclosure for a steal somewhere. 
> Like if you happened to work at a company that kept
> old equipment... :) Another solution would maybe be to
> isolate the file server from your network with just
> either a crossover cable or a small hub connecting it
> to your master backend.  You would of course need 2
> nics in the master.  I'm not sure how well it would
> work with livetv if you went from
> backend--->fileserver--->backend--->frontend.  Might
> have to make sure you got a lot of bandwidth between

Be aware that something as high performance as the scsi drives may
not be the right choice.

The best choice for video tends to be slow drives, 4500 rpm if you
can get them, though today 5400 rpm is your common choice.  Unless
you are serving tons and tons of people like a dorm-server.
Of course if you have drives around, you may decide to use what you have.

But even then, sometimes not.  36gb drives are not that valuable today
with disk space costing 40 cents/gigabyte.   Many other things such
as your time, but more importantly noise, heat and power are more
important than the $15 a 36gb drive is worth.

Consider that a drive, drawing 20 watts and on 24x7 wll use 175 kwh in
a year.   In California, at 13 cents/kwh that's almost $23 in electricity
to keep that drive running.   Plus all the noise and heat.

In other words, it's far more worth it to pick up a 200gb drive for $80.
Extra IDE controllers are cheap.

Your old SCSIs may be more reliable but they are also older.

HDTV needs about 18 megabits of bandwidth, even ancient ATA/33 is 33
megaBYTES of bandwidth.

NFS will not be an issue over gigabit ether (getting cheap) and not
even over 100mbit if you are just doing regular TV and not so much
HDTV.   You probably don't want to send more than 3 HDTV streams over
100mbit ethernet.


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