[mythtv-users] Wishlist feature for adding a hard drive

[Andrew Davis]

Brad DerManouelian wrote:
> On Oct 4, 2006, at 11:06 AM, Mark J. Small wrote:
>
>   
>> This got me to thinking.  Wouldn't it be nice if mythtv had the  
>> option of
>> multiple storage drives/directories?  Then it could do a sort of load
>> balancing between drives.  This would be most effective if the two  
>> drives
>> were on different cables, at least for PATA.
>>     
Of course, there's pros and cons no matter how you look at it... you 
could go with all individual drives and do as you say... split your 
recording, etc... perhaps everything from tuner 1 to disk A and from 
tuner 2 to disk B, etc. Of course, right now, you can separate some 
things... like having your MP3 and DVD rips on physically separate disks 
and your TV recordings on yet another. However, now you introduce single 
disk point of failures... you lose one and you lose all your recordings 
or all your DVD rips, etc. In my opinion, a RAID array of good disks is 
a much better solution. A RAID5, for example, will give you a bit better 
performance simply since the writes are spread over multiple disks. And 
a good, caching controller can help performance a lot. And with good 
drives at the heart (fast SATAII or SCSI), disk bottlenecks become a 
non-issue, or at least less of one... and you enjoy the benefits of 
knowing you can lose a drive and keep going. Of course, you can slice up 
partitions of a RAID array, but in the end all the reads and writes go 
to the same disk cluster and the same spindles. Or you can go your 
route... let's say you have three separate disks of 250Gb each... then 
you just get yourself an external USB2 or Firewire 1TB drive (like LaCie 
sells) and run a nightly rsync job to copy everything to the external 
drive. I guess I'm saying there are lots of options, but each has their 
pros and cons... whether in disk failure risk, performance, or cost...
>
> This is on the agenda. I read somewhere that it would be in .20 but  
> it didn't make it. Maybe .21?
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