[mythtv-users] Hardware Setup Advice

Andre mythtv-list at dinkum.org.uk
Wed May 23 14:30:54 UTC 2012


On 23 May 2012, at 14:53, Simon Hobson wrote:

> David Crawford wrote:
> 
>> However I'm sure there will be problems down the line as I have another PC setup with windows software with the same hardware and it encounters problems also when recordng many streams.
> 
> Your biggest issue will be disk seek times. Essentially, if you are recording 18 streams, then you have 18 threads which are syncing a file to disk once a second. This means the disk will be trying to do 18 seeks & writes/second - and a cursory look at the specs of most disks will reveal that this is likely to lead to a bottleneck.
> It's not the basic data rate that's the issue, it's the quantity of seeks that kills performance.

David I also find that in general AV specific drives work much better than generic consumer drives, I have many WD AV-GP and Seagate Pipeline drives. I find I am able to record 19 simultaneous HD streams across 5 disks without expensive hardware.

I also use MythTV in a broadcast environment, feel free to contact me off list if you think that would be useful.

Andre



> 
> Adding additional disks, each in a separate storage group, will spread the I/O load across multiple drives and you should have a lot less of a problem.
> Eg, if you add two more drives, then you'll end up with around 6 streams/drive - if you can "about manage" now on 18, then around 6 should be no problem. Even a second drive should help.
> 
> As for using a NAS, it depends very much on it's performance. Remaining polite, some NAS boxes "perform poorly", and it also varies with access method (SMB vs NFS vs AFP vs ...).
> 
> -- 
> Simon Hobson
> 
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