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

[Brad Benson]

On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 16:09:00 -0500, Jeff Simpson <llcooljeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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)

This is, in fact, exactly what I ended up doing with my Myth system. 
My master backend/frontend system is in the living room, but it only
contains a single 8GB drive for the OS.  All myth data is stored on
the NFS server in the closet in the back room - connected via 100MB
switched ethernet.  I've had it running like this for about 3 months
now and I have yet to see a single problem.  Oh, the NFS server is a
PII 266 with 192MB of RAM.  I did have to install an additional IDE
controller in order to support the dual 160GB drives in there as the
motherboard was too old to support drives that big, but that
controller only cost me $25.

Brad