NAS and the home network

[gEd]

I wonder if there really are that many writes to the hard drive by Windows? The hard drive light on my GBPVR machine hardly ever lights up when I'm watching Live TV, and all recordings would be stored elsewhere.

yes there will be many writes to the windows drive for temp, pchealth and swap files.

As Hayden said, a stripped down XP install would be a good idea and if you have (say) 1GB RAM in the client pc, you could disable the swap space altogether.

Moving the gbpvr db to the remote drive would reduce writes further but I don;t know whether this can be done - should be do-able.

On the subject of RAID, why do you want RAID - performance or reliability? I was thinking that if you are recording to a remote server (even over gigabit), the performance advantages will be wiped out. Using RAID 0 multiplies the risk of total failure by the number of drives that you have. So use RAID 1 for reliability or just spend the money on more disk space and take the risk - it's only TV....:-)

[TobyO]

I like RAID 5 only because I have all my pictures and home movies DVDs on it. I agree SoftRaid is not optimal for recording over the network, but I'm cheap and have an old "free" computer running SUSE linux (also free) that supports softRaid 5. I do back up the digital pictures onto DVD 2x year, just incase. The Home movie lib is to large so I relay on the tapes and the DVD as a total system back up. I have found and other people also have seen that some DVD-R last about 2 years before they fail. I'm not sure why, but they do scratch easily. I know some will respond with I use the same DVD for years with no problems, but that not been my luck.
The Soft RAID 5 works well over the Gb network to stream the files to the GB-PVR server, 2x clients, and 2 MVPs. I have had a disk failure, but recoved quickly.
For recording I have the RAID 0 drives in the GB-PVR Server. I think it helps me if all 4 TV tuners are being used in the 2 clients and the 2 MVPs. I use Video archive to automaticlly move the recordings to the Linux box 4 Days later. And you are right if I lose 4 Days of TV shows not a big deal.

Uncle John Thax for the responseon NASLite.

TobyO

[malgernon]

On the subject of RAID, why do you want RAID - performance or reliability? I was thinking that if you are recording to a remote server (even over gigabit), the performance advantages will be wiped out. Using RAID 0 multiplies the risk of total failure by the number of drives that you have. So use RAID 1 for reliability or just spend the money on more disk space and take the risk - it's only TV....:-)

I have to say, having looked further into it, I'm not so sure I need RAID. Like TobyO I strongly believe in backing important data to another hard drive (or even tape), not a DVD, but a weekly copy to a USB drive would probably be fine for my data.

I don't think what I want even qualifies strictly as NAS because I'd like to run a few things on it - FTP as mentioned, as well as Azureus. Maybe even a mailserver.

But I plan to go over to CF card for my OS/GBPVR and will bear in mind what you say about writes, BartPE and so on. I'll post here how it goes, both in reducing Windows down to an absolute minimum and reducing writes to disk.

[gEd]

I have to say, having looked further into it, I'm not so sure I need RAID. Like TobyO I strongly believe in backing important data to another hard drive (or even tape), not a DVD, but a weekly copy to a USB drive would probably be fine for my data.

DVD is fine for backups as long as you store them properly (in a case). I have no idea how many years they will last but I refresh my backups fairly often.

If you store the DVD's off-site (I keep mine at work) then you are also protected against fire and theft. TV shows I can kiss goodbye with little more than a sigh but my photo collection means everything to me.

good luck with the build, I will be interested to hear how it goes.

[malgernon]

Thanks - it's little more than an experiment at the moment

You may trust the longevity of DVDs, but they're not as convenient as HD. Say you have 120GB of data that's precious for memories, price or time you've invested (photos, music, hobbies, and OS '.iso' backups). Thats a lot of DVDs (and time-consuming burning). Plus hard-drive back-ups can be incremental.

[Ted the Penguin]

http://www.klsecurity.com/schwab_datafortress.htm
there, water/fire proof storage

[malgernon]

http://www.klsecurity.com/schwab_datafortress.htm
there, water/fire proof storage

How about a bomb-proof Hard Drive enclosure from the Far East? Hopefully not prescient considering the headlines

http://www.mobilewhack.com/reviews/what_..._data.html

[gEd]

Quote: it's nearly bomb-proof. Wow, is that possible? I think this should go to army personal rather than consumers. The HDPG-SU can stand a death fall of 122cm.

That's not really my idea of bomb-proof.........:-)

You're absolutely right. DVD is not much good when you have 120GB of data. I have about that much just my mp3 collection and I back it up to an internal HD. If the PC is stolen, I'm screwed. I need an external HD.

My photos (18GB) are on my laptop and on dvd in the office - so that's 3 copies (at least).