[mythtv-users] 1TB external for $199

[aaron]

On 11/20/07, Andrew Close <aclose at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> wouldn't the USB interface be/become a bottleneck for Myth usage if
> you had more than one tuner or were watching and recording at the same
> time?

I'm using a 1 TB MyBook (Western Digital) with two PVR-250s and I
haven't noticed any bottlenecks. I'm recording at about 2.5 GB/hour,
so it might be that my bitrates are low enough not to cause a
problem... According to hdparm (and informally with cp and a
stopwatch) I get about 14 MB/sec to the drive.

I do, on occasion, get some frustrating "hangs" that might result in
hiccups in the recording, but they are very few and far between and
haven't caused me much grief.

In the case of the MyBook, I think the spindown is hard-coded in the
drive/enclosure at 10 minutes. I made a five-minute cron job that
touches a file on the mountpoint to keep it spinning.

I did have to disable "debug" (or was it "info") in my syslog because
the log was getting spammed with zillions of SCSI messages. Filled my
root partition in a matter of minutes while I was copying files over
to test out the drive. I'm not sure if I accidentally turned on
verbose SCSI logging in my efforts to get the drive to be recognized
or what. :)

-- 
aaron

"Oh oh oh. I'm incoherent with excitement. Please tell me what fascinating
bit of badger-sputumly inconsequential trivia you will assail me with next."
        -- Arthur Dent