[mythtv-users] Impact of external firewire drive

[Brian Wood]

Bruce Richardson wrote:
> I just spent the weekend setting up MythTV on an old Mac Mini G4
> (Debian testing, mythtv-0.20.2, Hauppauge WinTV Nova-TD stick,
> combination backend and frontend) and am very happy with the results.
> It's currently using the internal hd for everything and I have a decent
> Firewire 400 drive I could connect to it, but being new to MythTV (and
> PVRs in general) I don't know enough to predict the results.
> 
> My back-of-the-beermat calculations tell me that the bandwidth should be
> fine for recording and I would expect that having the OS and data on
> different disks to reduce contention for disk io, but I just don't know
> if some of the more intensive video processing work done by MythTV would
> punish the firewire disk.  Opinions from MythTV veterans welcomed.
> 

My guess is that you would be OK, but there is no substitute for actual 
testing.

The HDD in the mini is certainly no ball of fire (I think it's a 4200 
RPM unit), I think a F/W drive might come close to it in performance.

I'd guess if you run into trouble with that setup it would be the CPU.

beww


beww