[mythtv-users] Using firewire or usb external drives

[Mark Knecht]

Hi,
   I run one of my backends with only 1394 storage for MythTV. It
works fine as long as 1394 itself works. There are many 1394 OHCI
adapters and some hard drives that either don't work or don't work
well under Linux. Make sure, if possible, to get an OHCI adapter using
a TI controller and a drive, if possible, that uses an Oxford bridge
if you can tell what's in it.

   That said my backend runs with a 300GB Maxtor One Touch and it
works fine. The main issue is to ensure it's online at record and
playback time. Build 1394 support as modules and load sbp2 support to
use the drive. After that it's all pretty straight forward.

   I don't think drive performance or file system choices make much
difference at all for something like MythTV. Real bandwidth
requirements are really very low. In your recording two shows and
watching 3 shows at the same time is still less than 5MB/S. Pretty
much anythign will keep up in my experience. More important, I find,
is the stability of the network assuming you're using wireless like we
are. That was the biggest hurdle we faced.

Hope this helps,
Mark

On 9/10/05, Henry Fleischmann <henry at fishcasa.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I'm setting up my first Mythtv system on Gentoo and had a question about
> storage. What kind of problems will I run into if I base all my storage
> for recorded programs, stored movies, MP3s, etc. on external USB or
> firewire drives? For now I am putting my frontend and backend on the
> same system (Asus Pundit-r 3Ghz, 200GB HD) which only has 1 HD bay but I
> plan to move to separate frontend and backend setup if I find Mythtv and
> I get along ok. External drives seem like a good solution due to ease of
> expansion the ability to migrate them fairly easily to other systems.
> 
> Should I avoid I stick with one directory per drive and avoid JFS/XFS?
> Is performance to low? Are their know problems with JFS or XFS on these
> kinds of drives? If I add all the drives to one files system will the
> spanned file systems be difficult to get back up on a different system
> that recognize the drives in a different order than the original?
> 
> I am fairly familiar with JFS on SCSI drives using HP-UX (as of a couple
> years ago) but have never used it on Linux or with IDE.
> 
> Thanks in advance!
> Henry
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>