<p>I don't have the information to hand but you need to use a special format for those WD greens under windows as the sector size is a bit different. I have two of these and they outperform my 7200rpm 250gb drive, which is a couple of years older admittedly. Google the model and performance there's a forum post that covers how to do it.</p>
<p>Sent from the tiny keyboard on my phone.</p>
<p><blockquote type="cite">On 10/04/2010 8:37 PM, "Stephen Worthington" <<a href="mailto:stephen_agent@jsw.gen.nz">stephen_agent@jsw.gen.nz</a>> wrote:<br><br><p><font color="#500050">On Sat, 10 Apr 2010 18:04:33 +1200, you wrote:<br>
<br>>What would you all consider good in terms of enough...</font></p>I would be a little wary of the "eco" and "green" type drives. They<br>
are actually 5400 rpm mostly, although they can run faster sometimes.<br>
I have WD 1.5 Tbyte green drive and it has wildly varying performance<br>
with Vista - I can not predict if a given file transfer will be very<br>
slow or very fast. It is supposed to speed up to 7200 rpm as<br>
necessary, but sometimes it does not even when copying a<br>
multi-gigabyte file. And the base speed when running at 5400 is<br>
annoyingly slow.<br>
<br>
I am currently using a Samsung HD103UJ (plain 7200 rpm drive, no<br>
eco/green stuff) with everything except the swap partition on the same<br>
drive. With this drive, I find I am recording 4 programs at once at<br>
least twice a week without any problems. That would normally be a mix<br>
of DVT-T HD, DVB-T SD and one Sky via MPEG2 hardware encoding (similar<br>
data rate to TV1 HD at 720p). On top of that I am playing back one<br>
program and running two commercial skip processing jobs and while the<br>
hard disk is busy, there is no sign that it is unable to cope. MythTV<br>
does run a bit sluggishly though when using the menus, but playback<br>
once it starts is still smooth.<br>
<br>
The drive specification that matters most is probably not the transfer<br>
rate, but the access time, as when using the MythTV database and<br>
running multiple recordings and so on at the same time, the drive is<br>
spending most of its time moving the heads around.<br>
<br>
I would recommend putting the system and database on one drive and<br>
recordings on another if you can manage that. Ideally having two<br>
drives for recordings would be a good thing if you want to have good<br>
performance in the menus while also doing lots of other things. Myth<br>
has options for whether you want it to spread activity around to<br>
balance storage use, balance I/O activity, or balance both as best it<br>
can.<br>
<br>
My recordings partition is JFS (recommended), with everything else<br>
ext3. I do not recommend ext4 yet as it is much more liable to lose<br>
data and get corrupted in emergency situations (such as power failure<br>
or PC crash).<br>
<p><font color="#500050"><br>>I currently have a 160G IDE, and 2 320G SATA drives all lumped together in <br>>Linux'es native what-...</font></p>There appears to be a mild memory leak in mythfrontend at present, and<br>
a really bad one in KDE's plasma-desktop. That makes my box very<br>
laggy unless I shut them down and restart them every so often to<br>
prevent major swapping activity. I have seen plasma-desktop using 1<br>
Gibyte of RAM!<br>
<p><font color="#500050"><br>_______________________________________________<br>mythtvnz mailing list<br>mythtvnz@lists.linuxnut.co.nz...</font></p></blockquote></p>