Best hard drive config? (1 Viewer)

[psykix]

I have the following config :-

MePo 1.2.2 with 6 tuners (TBS6984 & TBS6981)

C: drive is 60Gb SSD which is used for OS, MP install (along with MSSQL) and timeshift buffers for all tuners.
D: drive is 1Tb SATA used for recordings for all tuners.
E: drive is Bluray player
F: drive is 8Tb RAID 5 array on a separate Perc 6/i PCIe controller for media (movies/tv series etc)

I also have floating about another spare 3.5" 1Tb SATA drive, and a 2.5" 120Gb 7200rpm SATA drive.

I'm trying to figure out what the best configuration would be to give best performance - last night when recording 3 programmes and watching another, the live TV was stuttery every now and then and I don't know if it was hard drive performance.

When are the timeshift buffers used? Are they used when recording also? I'm wondering whether moving the timeshift buffers off the SSD onto the spare 120Gb drive may help?

Cheers!

 

[hafblade]

No imho it won't help.

Timeshift on SSD makes the whole thing much faster BUT the recordings are written directly to there target location which is your D: drive.
If you now have 3 recordings running they all write on you probably slow (compared to your SSD) D: drive.

The solution for your problems could be one of those:
- Also set the recording target folder on your SSD. This would speed it up BUT first I suppose there won't be enough place on this drive (60gb) and second it's not good for the lifetime of your SSD which only can give you a certain amount of writing cycles.
- Another solution would be to split up into different recording folders for the specific TV cards i.e. the first and the fourth card use on hdd, the second and the fifth another hdd and the third and the sixth use some third hdd. So the recording are divided onto different hard drives and they aren't a bottleneck anymore.

I think the second solution is the best. Split up your recording folders on different hard disc drives for different TV cards so that they never use the same target locations.

 

[JDWestoby]

I have 5GB of RAM as a Temp/Pagefile disk, all the timeshifting goes onto there too - can't get faster than that! (8GB in PC, SuperSpeed RAM disk ~£30).

Music, Pictures, Videos are on a Synology NAS.
I haven't got around to replacing my C: drive with a SSD (I'd like to stop ANY writes to the System disk*) but have it on a separate 40GB HDD, the recordings go onto a 1TB HDD.


*I have some MediaPortal clients that have SSD and use EWF to prevent writing to the SSD entirely!

 

[JACOB B]

With multiple HDTV channels recording at the same time, I found recording to a single HDD gave me too many stutters.

I have a WHS 2011 setup running my TV server. OS and MP TV-server (and FTR plugin) runs on a 64 GB SSD.
I have 3 tuners and three dedicated HDDs. Each tuner gets a seperat HDD for recording. Timeshift was initially tried on a RAMdisk, but with only 8 GB available on WHS 2011, a 4 GB ramdisk for timeshift was too small for my taste (only watching HDTV). I actually bought 16 GB RAM, but later found out you can only use 8 Gb on WHS 2011...

Now, I use the Tuner with lowest priority (lets call it tuner 3) harddrive for timeshift buffer. It's a compromise, but this way most of the time this HDD will only be used for timeshift. If I am recording from three tuners, I can't watch live TV anyway, unless it happens to be on the same MUX. This will rarely happen for me.

In addition, I plan on (new setup ) running a script at night moving all recordings to a dedicated storage HDD. Thus, most of the time when watching recordings, you will be watching from the storage HDD, while the recording HDDs are used just for that, recording.
This keeps the recording HDDs clean and defragged.