[mythtv-users] OT: 160 gig WD - $40

Jeff Simpson llcooljeff at gmail.com
Mon Mar 21 21:09:00 UTC 2005


On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 16:02:01 -0500, sschaefer1 at woh.rr.com
<sschaefer1 at woh.rr.com> wrote:
> I use 4 IDE drives on the motherboard's (2) IDE controllers. Using them as a stripe set in their master-slave configuration is fine, even for my VideoToaster which does uncompressed D1 NTSC/PAL video. I don't quite think it is as fast as 60 MB/s, but if I remember right the test utility reported an average of ~52 MB/s... until about 40% of drives were used then it quickly dropped down to ~26-22 MB/s. I'm still wondering how USB 2.0 would do... yes it'd be a permanent connection, and cheaper than SCSI, and possibly cheaper than SATA, especially since I have no open PCI slots, but available USB 2.0 ports.

With a lack of PCI slots and IDE channels, USB seems like the next
available option.

I personally would have opted for an external NFS server before paying
for external drives, however. Gigabit or even 100 meg ethernet should
be reasonably fast for video, especially if it's dedicated and on a
switch, and you can get an NFS server running on a pretty low-end
system (assuming it supports large drive capacities, of course). Plus
it gives you future expandability (and you can seperate your
frontend/backend like that as well)

 - Jeff


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list