[mythtv-users] OT? Shuttle + ProRAID or Obsidian case for i3/i5 Myth BE ?

[Kenneth Emerson]

On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 8:27 AM, Richard Morton
<richard.e.morton at gmail.com>wrote:

> No! Don't use the same drives for recording/media with OS / database /
> swap, keep recordings on separate disks to those that get hit hard for
> intermittant other activities. You need good throughput on your recording
> drives and you don't want the heads of the disks going crazy trying to
> satisfy a lot of media read and write requests while also doing a scheduler
> run.
>
> Keep the os/database/swap on a sepaprate small (40gb) drive possibly ssd if
> you have the budget.
>

Thought I'd throw in my two cents worth. I definitely agree with Richard
about using separate spindles for the OS/database and recordings.

And for those who want a convenient way to hot swap/configure 3.5" drives, I
have purchased and recommend:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816215081

This is a cage that fits in three 5.25" external bays of a tower box and
will hold 5 3.5" disks.  Hot swappable, SATA. Plus it looks cool if a bit
nerdy.  I have used it to upgrade 5 1TB drives to 5 3TB drives all while the
system was running.

I do have to take exception with Martin on his comments about using 3TB
drives.  It isn't (or wasn't for me) straight forward.  Yes, you have to use
GPT format for partitioning and there are tools available to do that.  And
yes, GRUB2 does have support for RAID1 on the boot drive; however, I had a
heck of a time getting grub2 to install on each of the  five drives.  While
the install said it was successful (actually it said that it detected no
errors) on each of the five drives, I can only boot successfully off of two
of them, which is OK since I can set those two to be the first two drives in
my BIOS hard drive boot sequence and I don't expect to have two drive
failures at the same boot time.  I'm sure it can be made to work, just don't
believe that it's all easy.  Make sure you test everything to be sure you
have a working system before disaster befalls you.

-- Ken E.
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