[vdr] More features for Livebuffer

[Steffen Barszus]

Tony Houghton schrieb:
> On Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:32:02 +0000
> Gavin Hamill <gdh at acentral.co.uk> wrote:
>
>   
>> On Mon, 2009-03-02 at 19:15 +0000, Tony Houghton wrote:
>>     
>>> On Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:30:55 +0200
>>> Rene Hertell <linuxtv at hertell.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>       
>>>> Tony Houghton wrote:
>>>>         
>>>>> On Mon, 2 Mar 2009 08:50:42 -0800
>>>>> But I wonder, does writing to the HD really shorten its life
>>>>> significantly compared to constant spinning or frequently being spun up
>>>>> and down?
>>>>>           
>>>> Yes, i guess it does, cause it writes to the hdd:s surface constantly in
>>>> large amounts...
>>>>         
>>> But there's no physical contact, the surface just has its magnetic
>>> polarity changed (or something like that). Is there a limit to how many
>>> times it can survive those changes? Or perhaps the head moving mechanism
>>> can wear out?
>>>       
>> I thought the driving force for having HDs power down was to reduce
>> power, noise and heat? 
>>     
>
> Yes, avoiding disc access to keep it spun down is a good idea, but it's
> difficult to keep one spun down in Linux because of logging activity
> etc. Even if you manage to solve that problem I think the drive would
> still need to be used often enough to make it a good idea only if it's
> something like a laptop drive, designed to be spun up and down more
> frequently than a desktop one.
>   
Well there are more things in the world then you think ;) - Some people 
use CF card , some people Microdrives, some Notebookdrives. The video 
directory is on a couple of harddisks. Thats possible if you layout the 
directory structure correct with vdr. My machine ist running from a 
microdrive since more then a year now.

Livebuffer would sure be interesting but not if: 1) it constantly keeps 
the disks spinning 2) it consumes a fixed amount of memory.

Is there some tmpfs which allocates a certain percentage of given memory ?
Would livebuffer be able to cope with that ?

Then i would for sure pick a bit RAM and try it out. Again: Livebuffer 
might be nice - but not for the price to pay ...

Kind Regards

Steffen