[mythtv-users] thoughts on a combined backend/NAS box?

[Tim Draper]

On 16 July 2013 06:55, GZ <gzornetzer.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> I've been thinking about upgrading my mythtv setup and at the same time,
> I've also been looking at buying a RAID5 NAS box.  After looking at the
> price tags on some of those enclosures, I'm thinking about just building a
> combination RAID / mythbackend box.  I've read some of the guidance on the
> wiki, indicating that RAID really isn't the best way to go for the mythtv
> recording drive.  I'm thinking about the following drive setup:
>
> 1 SSD for the OS/database
> 1x 1 tb for active recording (my existing recordings drive.  Eventually, I
> may just upgrade this to a 3tb drive that would act something like an in-use
> hot spare
> 4x 3tb drives in RAID5 for archive storage (pictures / long-term video
> archive)
>
> Since all of my tuners are now external (HDHR prime & usb QAM), I'm thinking
> about a microitx motherboard to keep this box smallish (corner of my
> office).  There are a few H77 boards with 6 total SATA ports an H87 board
> with 6x 6gbps sata.  I figure that a 4-core ivy bridge or haswell process
> has plenty of juice for this.
>
> Couple of things that I'd like to do:
> - It would be cool to move shows from the recording drive to the archive
> upon lossless transcode.  Do I have to write custom transcode rules to do
> this?
>
> - I'd like to use ACPI wakeup to reduce power usage on this system.  This
> means that I'm going to need some way to lock mythbackend when I want to use
> the NAS functionality.  I suppose that I could run some mythfrontends on the
> client, but that's pretty kludgy.  How complex is it to code up a client
> that connects to mythbackend enough to bump the usage count and block
> shutdown?  Alternatively, does anyone have a good way to trigger a
> mythwelcome lock and unlock commands remotely over the network?
>
> Any advice or thoughts are welcomed.
> Thanks very much,
> -Greg
>
>
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>

i use such a setup; multi-purpose server; mythtv, torrents, file
server, VM host (2 guests). runs perfect.
hardware is a core2duo E6550, 6gb ram, SSD as boot, 3x 1tb drives in
raid10 (god knows how the data is spread, i just let webmin & linux
raid handled it for me). plenty of disk bandwidth for 2x HD feeds and
1x SD, aswell as file serving.
it runs a zotac ITX board in the CFI A7879 case (highly recommend this case!)

your on the right lines with the hardware; to use all ports on that
case, then you need 5 (4 hot-swap drives + 1 internal boot drive), and
if i were buying now, i'd most likely look at the intel i3 chip (or a
low power model from AMD - not sure whats available) based on my
current e6550 @ ~50w sys load, then it's costing me around £55/year
for 24/7 use.