Disk Spanning

[Wulf]

You can also use the archiver utility included with the video archive plug-in to copy files off of your main disk to the other two. It is not exactly a spanning disk, but the end result is the same.

Jeff

I think I am going to go with that for now. I would hate for one disk to go down and bring my whole system to a stop. Thanks for the info.

[TobyO]

This might be a solution if you already know linux. I have just built a linux box with software raid 5. I use samba to share the drives over the network. I don not recorded to theses drives but use jeffs video archives to transfer them over after 10 days. The softraid 5 is fast enought to watch movies over 2 MVP and the gb-pvr computer/TV. I have not tried to record directly to the drives. The linux box is an Athlon 1800+ on a 266 MSI mother board with 512 gb ram. I have set up 3 x softraid 5 disk (4 x 320, 3 x120, and 4 x 160) over a gb lan. After the intial set up of the disk all has gone seemlessly. I used 10.1 opensuse verison for the linux box. I did tried other verison (freeNAS and openfile), but had issues of stability of the raid. The bonus with a linux box is you can always added more HD. I'm using verison 97.09 gbpvr on a windows XP pro machine. The pit fall is another computer to take care of and the network traffic will 2x to stream content. (Linux box to gbpvr and pvr to MVP.)

TobyO

[Jeff]

I'd be intersted in learning more about the box you built and any step-by-step instructions you have. I have been thinking of building a Linux based soft raid but haven't found info info online to take the plunge. I have never used linux before so I need something easy to follow.

Jeff

[TobyO]

I would be happy to , This was my first try at linux . Give me a day to get some pic and some helpful links, but it is fairly straight forword.

TobyO

[Wulf]

That is one thing I really liked about Linux was the ability to add more space. I inteded on using Linux for this reason but spent two weeks trying to get my PVR up and running only to have version conflicts within Gentoo. I switched to Windows and was up and running in one day.

I also find I like GB-PVR much better than MythTV. The interface and configuration is simple.

Also I tried to install the video archive tool, but when I loaded up teh configuration it gave me a bunch of errors. I had to uninstall the video archive inorder for the configuration to load properly. Any ideas?