[mythtv-users] Best configuration for current hardware

[Richard Shaw]

I'm looking at upgrading a few components in my current myth box as it
works but is marginal for HD playback.

Current specs:
Sempron 64 3000+ (Socket 754)
512MB PC3200 ram
250GB ATA/100 hard drive.
Nvidia 6200 AGP graphics.

I can't really afford to build a completely new box so I'm wondering
how best to configure what I have and an additional hard disk and
maybe an upgrade to 1GB ram.

On boot and non TV usage it doesn't use hardly any swap space but
after watching/recording a few shows it uses as much as 500MB. When
there is a lot of disk activity things get really slow and sometimes
don't recover but will just "sit" there until I exit TV mode and go
back in.

I'm planning on adding a 500GB SATA drive and will likely format it
XFS but I have some configuration options I'd like some input on.

1. Should I mess with LVM for the second drive or just make it one big
partition?
2. Should I move the ring-buffer to the second drive? This would
offload it from the primary drive which is formatted EXT3, however, if
I separated it from the recorded videos then it would be able to copy
from one drive to another which should be much faster than copying to
and from the same disk.
3. Would I see a significant improvement with upgrading my ram to 1GB?
Just playing HD content only uses 30-50% CPU even without XvMC but
even using the OSD causes small pauses in playback.

I was initially planning on just taking the easy way out and adding
the new drive and copy /var over to it since I'm using the
/var/lib/myth* directories but I thought it might be better to at
least create a new /media directory and just move the media related
files instead.

Thanks,
Richard