[mythtv-users] Anyone archiving to Blu-Ray Disks?

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Thu Jul 8 14:05:23 UTC 2010


On Thursday, July 08, 2010 07:49:48 am Eric Sharkey wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
> > USB drive cases are relatively cheap, but performance stinks,
> 
> I'm going to disagree with this one.  I bought an external 2TB USB 2.0
> drive a couple of months ago and moved my rips that I have with
> mythvideo over to the external drive and I haven't had any performance
> problems at all.  Even the full bit rate blu ray rips play flawlessly.
>  Sure, esata would have been faster, but USB 2.0 is plenty fast enough
> for playback of HD material.

For a single USB  drive, probably, but what about multiple USB drives, perhaps USB tuners, an HD-PVR or two and other 
things on that USB bus at the same time?

Then there's the kids plugging in iPods, mobile phones and other things just to charge them. That USB bus is starting to 
look pretty crowded and problem-prone.

I'm sure it's improved, but I recall my early experiences with USB 2.0 devices and Linux, I had a lot of mysterious 
freezes and outright crashes, some of which were due to poor USB implementation by the device makers, but the Linux USB 
drivers made their contribution as well.

> 
> > and most of them need a wall wart, take up space, generate
> > heat and are a PIA in general.
> 
> It does need a wall wart, but the drive automatically spins down when
> not in use (which is most of the time, since recordings don't go
> there) so heat/power is minimal.  It's been painless.

I forgot about the spin-down, good point, but for long-term off-site storage I think plastic disks may be a better answer, 
far less infrastructure required.

Of course I also have DLT tape, but the media cost there is just unreasonable, and I don't expect it to improve.




More information about the mythtv-users mailing list