[mythtv-users] Recording storage suggestions

Phill Wiggin alamar at gmail.com
Thu May 24 13:08:38 UTC 2007


On 5/24/07, Brian Long <briandlong at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/23/07, Phill Wiggin <alamar at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I've convinced a few friends to use Myth (they now love it), and
> > helped them decide on LVM.  Now that Storage Groups are available,  I
> > can't recommend LVM for Myth.  I lost a nearly full ~1TB LVM set
> > because one drive decided to give up the ghost.
>
> It sounds like you're saying LVM = RAID 0 (or concatenation).  Of
> course one drive will make the entire set go away; that's what
> striping or concatenation gives you.  :)  If you use LVM on top of
> RAID 1 or RAID 5, it's stable and has been for a fairly long time.
>
> LVM allows easy concatenation of 2 drives, but this is dangerous
> because you're basically doubling your chances of a single drive
> failure taking out your entire LVM volume group.  I would not discount
> LVM based on RAID 0 or concatenation issues.  If you want redundancy
> in your storage system, eat the cost of a third drive and run RAID 5.
> It won't be just as fast as RAID 0, but it's plenty fast for multiple
> SD and/or HD recordings at once (as shown by many others on this
> list).
>
> Just my $0.02.
>
> /Brian/

Well, the OP was asking whether he should add a 160G HD to his
existing 160G HD w/ LVM to increase storage capacity.  So in that
case: yes, LVM ~= RAID0.   The OP wasn't concerned about redundancy,
just increased storage space.

Don't get me wrong. LVM's a great tool for the appropriate
circumstances.  But, for Myth systems, I don't recommend it to my
friends. Given what the OP (and what the majority of users I help)
wanted along with the fact that Storage Groups give you the best of
both worlds (increased storage space, less than 100% data loss), I
suggest SVN + more (or larger) HDs.

--PhillW


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