Multiple Tuners, But How Many Hard Drives?

[stampede96]

Quick question for everybody. GBPVR has worked great for me in the past (not currently using it due to a lack of cable television and crappy OTA reception). I'm thinking about a few months down the road when I will have cable again, and would like to put another 1 or 2 PVR-150s (or a PVR-500) with the one PVR-150 I currently have (need to be able to record Fox primetime Sunday nights along with Desperate Housewives on ABC). I am wondering though, can they all record to the same drive (the current drive recorded to is only for television)? Or do I need to get additional drives? Does each tuner need its own drive?

Keep in mind I don't intend to record three different channels at once, I mainly want to record two different channels at varying timeslots. For that matter if Sunday night Fox is my goal (U.S.) along with ABC, maybe two cards is enough. I just want to make sure I don't miss parts of shows if they are not perfect bottom to top of the hour slots.

Thanks for the help! I don't want to be over spending on the hard drives if I can help it!

[ricklous]

yeah they all record to the same drive...and i would have though if its a dedicated PVR with the majority of that 200GB drive in your sig available for recordings, then that should be fine really, at least until you get a better idea of the amount you record every week. theres no point spending a big wad of cash on a drive if your routine is record-watch-delete. if you're more of an archive/hoarder though, you may find yourself needing a bigger driver some point in the future, or trying out one of the dvd burning plugins if moneys tight....

[herbs]

I have recorded 4 shows at once on a PATA 7200rpm harddrive without any issues.

[stampede96]

Thanks to both of you for the quick responses, especially you herbs. I forgot about that sig though...that machine is mostly intact still, but as I have no need for a PVR at the moment I've gutted it for the most part.

My intention is to use a Athlon 3200 (actually a Turion) with 1GB of RAM for my new PVR. Now that I know I can record all tuners to one hard drive, that makes things easier. I'm going to have BitTorrent (uTorrent) and some sort of a web server running, but neither of those are really processor intensive (uTorrent was about 5%-10% worst case CPU on that Sempron in my sig). In the end TV will have it's own drive, while general data and downloads will each have their own as well. The computer also might be serving a file or two, but I imagine with all the tuners using hardware encoding it would all work out. Wouldn't you think?

[herbs]

The cpu was a duron 1.6ghz that was recording 4 channels at once if that helps with 1GB of ram.