Multiple drive support

[pwtenny]

Is there any possibility of getting multi-drive support into GB-PVR? Something as simple as supporting more than one directory for storing recordings? I've recently put a 160GB drive in my DVR and now the 80GB drive it is booting from is completely empty and mostly useless.

Based on what I've found, you have to setup hard drives in XP when you install the OS in order to "stripe" them, or whatever you call it when the OS treats two drives as one.

That's not much of a fun option since this new drive is SATA on a PCI-SATA controller. That means floppy drivers and a clean OS install.

It'd be much easier to get it done at the application level :o

[sub]

Its on my list of things to do in a future release. I cant tell you exactly when it'll be done though.

[pwtenny]

Sounds good.

[rbelisle]

You could try the video archive utility on the Wiki, it will move items to other drives and update the database. It's a good stop-gap until the main program changes.

[gEd]

agreed.

Set gpvr to record to your 80gb drive and use video archive to move those recordings more than n days old over to the 160gb drive. What you set n to depends on how much you record and how much you keep vs deleting after watching.

[jim08127]

Is there any possibility of getting multi-drive support into GB-PVR? Something as simple as supporting more than one directory for storing recordings? I've recently put a 160GB drive in my DVR and now the 80GB drive it is booting from is completely empty and mostly useless.

Based on what I've found, you have to setup hard drives in XP when you install the OS in order to "stripe" them, or whatever you call it when the OS treats two drives as one.

That's not much of a fun option since this new drive is SATA on a PCI-SATA controller. That means floppy drivers and a clean OS install.

It'd be much easier to get it done at the application level :o

I am going to convert my recording drive which is disk 2 (third) on my system to raid 0. All that has to be done is empty off everything you want to save. add the new drive and turn on raid support on the mobo to begin the setup. The issue with setting up raid initially is only for the system drive or boot drive afaik.

If your mobo doesn't support raid you could presumably add a card that does.

On the other hand I also look forward to this being a capability in gbpvr

[gEd]

pwtenny: RAID isn;t actually a good solution to what you are trying to do as you should really only do RAID with identical disks (or at least the same size).

Striping an 80 and a 160GB drive together would give you 160GB I believe.

Also, I would personally not go down the striping route (RAID 0) for gbpvr.
You don;t need the extra disk performance and you multiply the risk of loosing everything by the number of drives that you have.

I could see why one might want to create the recording drive using RAID 1, whereby you mirror the drives which gives you redundency but at the expense of halving your available disk capacity.

[jim08127]

pwtenny: RAID isn;t actually a good solution to what you are trying to do as you should really only do RAID with identical disks (or at least the same size).

Striping an 80 and a 160GB drive together would give you 160GB I believe.

Also, I would personally not go down the striping route (RAID 0) for gbpvr.
You don;t need the extra disk performance and you multiply the risk of loosing everything by the number of drives that you have.

I could see why one might want to create the recording drive using RAID 1, whereby you mirror the drives which gives you redundency but at the expense of halving your available disk capacity.

gEd, are you using that 512 GB RAM for a Ramdrive? No wonder your drive speed is sufficient. /sarcasm

Actually I disagree with the speed is not needed part. If the system is also used for burning dvd's, multiple clients, multiple capture cards. Or maybe my 320 GB SATA hard drive just really sucks.

[gEd]

actually it's 1GB now - 512 is borderline for gbpvr ;-)

if you are running mutliple clients and recording multiple channels that you may have a fair point. I have recorded 3 shows at the same time to my single IDE drive without problem, other than the fact that I guess the recordings are all interleaved, which then get defragged the following morning.

RAID 0 gives a good performance boost - I've used it on my main rig for several years but you 2x (or more) the risk of loosing everything you haven;t backed up. Which happened to me once....:-(

[jim08127]

actually it's 1GB now - 512 is borderline for gbpvr ;-)

if you are running mutliple clients and recording multiple channels that you may have a fair point. I have recorded 3 shows at the same time to my single IDE drive without problem, other than the fact that I guess the recordings are all interleaved, which then get defragged the following morning.

RAID 0 gives a good performance boost - I've used it on my main rig for several years but you 2x (or more) the risk of loosing everything you haven;t backed up. Which happened to me once....:-(

I realize there is an increased risk to raid 0. But I consider it appropriate for recorded video and video playback etc. Anything I really want to save long term gets converted to DVD. I might take issue with the twice as likely to crash calculation. Each drive works less to do the same job as one.

A drive could go at anytime of course and raid zero is virtually impossible to recover last I checked. I believe too many power cycles is something that can kill drives. I leave my system on 24/7, but suspend the drives after an hour of inactivity. I also bought seagate drives with 5 year warranties. I think that speaks to their reliability a little.

The problem I see is hard drive accesses by the burning or editing software can cause the mvp connection to drop, and I only have one mvp right now. I am adding a second capture card shortly. It might just be my motherboard can't handle all the traffic I suppose. For 80 bucks I figured I'd give the raid array a try.