[vdr] Re: Disk suggestions?

[Carsten Koch <Carsten.Koch@icem.de>]

Antonino Sergi wrote:
...
> I'm going to buy hard drive(s) for VDR recordings (personal use):
> does anyone want to give me suggestion about the system (RAID(0,1,0+1),
> SCSI...), individual disk's size (80GB or more?), filesystem to use?

If money is not an issue, buy a bunch of U160 SCSI disks with 15 000 RPM.
They are fast, reliable, and *very* loud (not good for the living room).

At our main development office, we have an external IDE-to-SCSI RAID,
which, as a surprise to everyone, has turned out to be very unreliable.
Of course you are safe against one disk failing. But we had other problems,
like the RAID itself failing, second disk failing before recovery was 
complete, two power supplies failing, firmware problems, etc.

IMHO, as a home user you want individual disks with individual mount
points and file systems. No LVM, no RAID. 
So, if one disk fails, you lose at most the data on that one disk. 
That also makes you much more flexible in regard to reconfigurations,
testing a new Linux distribution, adding/changing disks, etc.

Disk size depends on other factors. If noise bothers you, get one 
160GB disk. If noise is not that much of an issue, buying two 80GB
disks will give you a slightly better price per GB (80 GB disks start 
at EUR 1.19/GB, 160 GB at EUR 1.35/GB) and a smaller chunk of data lost
when one disk fails.

As a file system, XFS has turned out to be both extremely reliable and
(at least for the typical VDR files) by far the top performer for me.
I have experience with XFS, Reiser, ext2 and ext3. Only XFS has never
let me down. I would not even remotely consider VFAT or anything in that
league. If you must read the files from windoze, use samba.

here is my VDR configuration:

/home/cko> df -hlT
Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3      xfs    9.3G  2.3G  7.0G  25% /
/dev/hda1     ext2     15M  4.2M   10M  29% /boot
/dev/hdb1      xfs    153G  124G   29G  81% /video2
/dev/hdc1      xfs    153G  120G   33G  79% /video
/dev/hdd1      xfs    114G   98G   17G  85% /video3
shmfs          shm    251M     0  250M   0% /dev/shm
/home/cko> 


Carsten.