[mythtv-users] Hardware list for new mythtv box

[jedi]

On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 10:51:53PM -0500, John Morris wrote:
> On Thu, 2013-05-23 at 12:43 +0100, Mike Perkins wrote:
> 
> > RAM is cheap at the moment. Buy as much as you can afford, up to the maximum the 
> > board can accept. You'll make use of it and it will allow you to do things much 
> > quicker than if the software has to write to disk all the time.
> 
> Admitted, ram is pretty cheap right now but I wouldn't recommend maxing
> it out. Guy said money was a consideration and there are better bangs
> for the buck beyond a fairly low bar.  I only have 2GB in my combined
> FE/BE and it isn't memory starved.
> 
> > I notice you haven't mentioned disk drives. You'll need at least two, a smallish 
> > system/database disk and one or more larger disks to keep your recordings on. I 
> > wouldn't bother with RAID, since "it's only TV".
> 
> Not much need for that.  I only have one 1.5TB WD Green (WDC

    This kind of situation can easily devolve into a performance issue as
multiple processes doing different types of file IO clash with each other.
The database as well as the OS itself both engage in read/write activity 
bound to conflict with the nice sequential streaming of recordings.

    Another spindle avoids that and sufficiently large SSD drives are
quite affordable now. 32G is more than you need and is likely to not 
contribute much expense or heat and noise to the final result.

    An SSD is cheap and easy performance tuning for the database that could
quickly get very interesting depending on what kind of rules you create.

[deletia]