[mythtv-users] Impact of external firewire drive

Peter Dash peter.dash at gmail.com
Mon Jan 21 17:09:36 UTC 2008


> 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.
>

I have almost exactly the same setup (except that my mini is a
core2duo 1.83) and I haven't had any problems whatsoever with the disk
io. All my recordings are on the external disk, everything else is on
the internal hd using Arch Linux.

I've had it quite happily recording two programs while watching one on
the same machine and one on a remote frontend. Although I haven't had
a chance to play with multirec yet, everything I've seen thus far
leads me to think that an extra stream or two probably won't be a
problem either. All in all a great, small, quiet combined
front/backend setup (and home server for that matter).

Peter.


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