[mythtvnz] Recording Drive Format type

[Criggie]

Neil Henwood wrote:
> I am going to do is to have a disk dedicated to recordings and use LVM
> so that I can add and remove disk as needed. So what drive format do
> people use out there for there myth box? LFS3, RiserFS, Fat32 (not b*
> likely) Also what sector size are people formatting them with?
> Not that it matters, I will be using Fedora 7 as the OS on the system.

1 Use a file system that is well supported by your distro, so that rules
out ext4 and reiserfs4
2 Pick one that has large file support (bye to ext2)
3 Choose one that does not have long fsck times when necessary (so not ext3)

Leaves exactly two filesystems, xfs and jfs.  I use xfs because... I don't
actually know.  Maybe X is a cooler letter than J....

As for LVM - wait a bit.  There's something in the line for mythtv (I
don't think its even in SVN yet) which is called Volume groups or Storage
groups.  You'll be able to have drives mounted at /myth/1, /myth/2 ...
/myth/X  (<-- theres that X again) and mythbackend will put stuff wherever
it fits.

The difference is that LVM will involve some space lost to reduncancy (in
raid 1 or raid 5) or a linear increase in the likelyhood of loosing your
whole LVM structure.

3x 500 GB drives in a raid 5 = 1000 Gb storage, fault tolerance.

3x drives in a LVM = MTBF drops to 1/3, tripling the likelyhood of losing
the whole array contents

3x drives in three separate mounts, three times more likely to loose at
least one drive, but the other two will still be okay with intact
filesystems.

So, XFS or JFS, one big drive (probably SATA) and wait for storage groups
before adding more.



-- 
Criggie

http://criggie.dyndns.org/