[mythtv-users] Faster CPU and more RAM in SD frontend or backend?

[Ian Clark]

2008/6/3 Johnny Russ <jruss at mit.edu>:

>
>
>>
>> With 2x160GB and 2x250GB drives, will you make a 4x160 RAID5 or RAID0?
>>
>
> Yeah I was a little worried about heat. Maybe its time to cut a fan hole in
> the side of my case. I think I am going to go with RAID5. The 160 GB drives
> are getting old and I imagine one of them is going to go eventually
>

I wouldn't worry too much about heat, modern HDs can cope quite well, and
the operating temp range is very broad. (Obviously don't run your drive out
of spec, but don't worry too much.)

If you've got an apache instance lying around 'munin' is quite a good
monitoring tool, I use it to keep an idea of the state of the hardware in my
pvr, and it'll do things like SMART monitoring.

How important is your recorded TV to you? If you backup the important stuff,
and the rest can be lost then don't bother with RAID, or not RAID5 anyway,
you'll loose the capacity of one of your drives, and the latest myth can use
multiple storage directories on multiple drives without issue (RAID 0 will
give a speed boost but if you loose one drive the whole lot goes.)

Regarding memory and CPU, my mythbox (FE and BE) is a dual AMD 2.4gig thing,
with a couple of gig of memory. It spends most of it's time recording SD tv,
and transcoding old recordings in the background, it has the following usage
over the last week:-

http://ohmyno.co.uk/myth/mem-week.png
http://ohmyno.co.uk/myth/cpu-week.png

Might help with deciding on memory/cpu.

FWIW, the following may be relavent too:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/18/massive-google-hard-drive-survey-turns-up-very-interesting-thing/
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