[mythtv-users] Hardware Suggestions/Sanity Check

[Robin Hill]

On Wed Apr 12, 2006 at 01:50:32PM -0400, Steven Adeff wrote:

> On 4/12/06, John Patrick Hoke <john.hoke at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Apr 11, 2006, at 1:48 PM, Steven Adeff wrote:
> > > On 4/10/06, John Patrick Hoke <john.hoke at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > As well, RAID 5 all your 250GB drives and create folders under that
> > > for dvd's, videos, etc. Here's why. 1) Speed, the more drives in the
> > > array the faster. Not necesarily something you will need, but hey, why
> > > not. 2) flexibility of what you put on, "damn, I've only got 3gigs
> > > left on the "DVD" drive, but 50 on the videos drive...." 3) With two
> > > RAID 5 arrays you essentially lose 2 drives to parity, with one you
> > > lose one drive to parity, and you most likely won't lose 2 drives at
> > > once, so save some money and RAID5 all 6 of the drives.
> >
> > Good advice, I am surprised I didnt see that myself. Still not 100%
> > sure if I will go hardware or software RAID, but either way it is a
> > good idea to ponder...
> 
> I'm gunna push software. The only downside is rebuilding a drive if
> one goes down. This is a CPU intensive task that a hardware controller
> can take care of in the background. I don't know what kind of
> processing power it would take on a Athlon64 3x00+ processor, which
> may cause some down time, but since yours will be a dedicated backend
> only, you can forgo the commflag and transcode'ing until the drive is
> rebuilt.
> 
I'd be surprised if rebuilding the array had much of a CPU impact - far
more of an issue will the the disk access during this time, as all the
drives will be busy.  Unless you've got a very slow CPU then I/O is
almost certainly the limiting factor with any RAID system (hardware or
software).

Cheers,
        Robin
-- 
     ___        
    ( ' }     |       Robin Hill        <myth at robinhill.me.uk> |
   / / )      | Little Jim says ....                            |
  // !!       |      "He fallen in de water !!"                 |
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