[mythtvnz] New list member - Hardware recommendations

[Curtis Walker]

On 10 January 2012 18:49, criggie <criggie at criggie.org.nz> wrote:
>
> > I'd recommend that the boot drive is a small (say 64GB) SSD as it makes
> > trying out new stuff and rebooting very fast!
> > Cheers Douglas
>
> >> My only comment would be to add a 2nd small hard drive for the OS and
> >> MySQL.  Leave the 1TB dedicated to just your recordings.
> >> - Wade
>
> > I have a spare 160 GB drive for the OS .I did consider an SSD but as I
> > have the 160 I will leave that for the future.
> > Paul
>
> Paul - I agree with Wade, so using the 160 is a great idea for OS.
> Personally I'd love some SSDs but they're not reasonably priced yet.
> Its only TV - the difference in speed between normal HDD and SSD isn't
> going to make any real difference.
> You can put a swap file on whichever of your hard drives is fastest, if
> you need swap.
> Adding more storage later is straightforward... just tell myth that it can
> store in /myth1, /myth2, ... /mythX   No need to mess about with raid and
> md devices.
>
>

Now is a terrible time to purchase a drive - so unless you absolutely
have to, recycle that 160GB.

In early October, Western Digital and Seagate had a junket in
Thailand. WD was buying Hitachi GST and already owns the late Maxtor,
and Seagate was buying Samsung. Both were well aware of this and had
been for over a year, and appear to have wanted to come to an
arrangement as to how they wanted to divide the market between each
other, now that there would be effectively only two big hard disk
manufacturers.

Thanks also to July floods in Thailand they decided what might be best
was to arrange for the big OEMs to buy huge loads in bulk to offset
the Q4 losses they would have from the purchases otherwise (and shore
up for any potential flood damage, which they’d use as the reason for
the resulting shortage, despite being fully insured.

They held another “consultation” in Thailand on October 17th and
appear to have decided this would make a brilliant excuse, and they’d
need the funds on tap to refurb the flood-damaged plants afterwards,
and agreed with each other to fix the prices, jacking them up
dramatically across the board: despite it only taking an estimate of 8
weeks to refurbish the machinery after the floods subsided—in fact, it
was in full production again by November 30th, well ahead of schedule
(they rushed it), although one building was still under 2 foot of
water by early December. This was offset —WD used Hitachi GST’s
various un-flooded production facilities to produce the shortfall of
WD drives.

Effect of the price-fixing was immediate: the price pretty much
doubled-to-tripled across the board, sometimes even higher, and
retailers started limiting supply. Profits were high and enormous
insurance claims had gone in, and the executives appeared to have been
in quite a congratulatory mood by mid-December - production was back
up to what appears to be full capacity, prices were still flying high,
sales were still limited, they’d cherry-picked the last of the
pre-flood drives for sale to OEMs at inflated prices, and were selling
the brand new drives to the wholesale retail channel for almost twice
what they were worth before October. The executives have pocketed a
very nice Christmas bonus.

There's more: The first lot of drives off the refurbished production
lines will very likely be very dodgy, as the equipment was, frankly,
repaired and replaced in a hurry and has not had time to properly
calibrate. The solution? Increase firmware tolerances and reduce
warranties. The OEMs don't want these drives and neither should you if
you value your data and the value of your purchase dollar.

Don't believe it? Check out the prices of HDD storage compared to 6
months ago. And keep an eye out on the warranty times.