[mythtvnz] mythtvnz Digest, Vol 21, Issue 38

[Steven Ellis]

On Thu, May 14, 2009 9:01 am, Sam Hadley-Jones wrote:
>>>I would suggest using a 16Gb or 32Gb Compact Flash card with an IDE
>> adapter.
>>>Saves gluing it all together.
>>
>> Although... thinking about it more.
>> 25watts running 24 hours a day is about $54 of power a year.
>> That means you have to spend less than $54 to get a payback within one
>> year.
>> More than a year and SSD's will probably have doubled in capacity and
>> halved in price.
>>
> It would really be the saving of 12W from the single 250GB Seagate
> spinning
> all the time as the system drive so that equates to only $27 annual
> savings
> - so I'm not really saving many trees. 4x 8GB USB flash sticks could be
> delivered for $130 all up. The cheapest 32GB solid state drives are just
> over $200 but the main problem is my 6 SATA ports are quite valuable.
> Having a rethink, a pair of 16GB CF cards in a CF to IDE adaptor would
> give
> me 40MB/s in RAID for about $180.
>
> I think that solid state storage should increase stability in Live TV a
> lot. I still get the odd freeze up from mythtv expiring stuff between
> shows
> while watching - even with slow deletes turned on, XFS for a file system
> and a big array. Having storage with an access time in the microseconds
> should solve that.

I'm really surprised at your freeze up issues. I'm using ext3 and slow
deletes and no longer have any playback issues.

Did you have a chance to run some performance tests on the raid5 array
like I suggested as i'm wondering if you have other issues.

--------------------------------------------
Steven Ellis - Technical Director
OpenMedia Limited - The Home of myPVR
email   - steven at openmedia.co.nz
website - http://www.openmedia.co.nz