Recording to Multiple paths

[skl111]

Here is a feature request.

I would like to be able to set a recording path per tuner. My current box has 5 tuners and I use all 5, so having a dedicated path per tuner would work great(ie 5 hard drives as I am using now) or being able to add the 5 paths and tell the system to load balance so it selects whichever path is not in use for a recording.

[Jakesty]

I'm not sure I'd want this. Because one week it might record on one tuner and the next week it might be on a different one. So trying to track down all of your recordings for a series would be a PIA.

[skl111]

I wouldn't think it would be mandatory, but and option for people with setups like mine, or who have multiple nas boxes and want to stream to them and have and LACP enabled on the server machine.

[Jaggy]

I could definitely see big advantages to being able to set a recording path per recording, but not so much per tuner.

[skl111]

I have 5 tuners, right now, with 2 of them being firewire, 1 H-950Q, 1 H-1600 and 1 H-1800. The amount of iops by all 5 tuners recording at the same time can saturate a single path's bandwidth(some software raid arrays, nas boxes or single hd's) easily. So having 5 paths(each one on a different raid array, nas box or HD) alleviates the iops saturating the paths bandwidth.
Iops saturation can cause data to be lost in buffers when recording, or not getting to the HD in order, creating the Green Squares!

[Jakesty]

In my opinion, you shouldn't be recording directly to the NAS device for that and many other bottleneck reasons. Instead, record locally on something fast, I use a RAID 0 array, then you can process COMSKIP and compression software if needed, then based on your needs, have the script move the file to the NAS that you have chosen.
I'm not sure how you are considering what your IOPS are, but typically the drives running locally in a simple array can easily handle numerous tuners recording to it at a time. A typical drive is something like 80 or 90 IOPS, how that equates to NIC bandwidth is a little different I think. The problem I see you having is with your network bandwidth. Most NAS run at 100mb, if you're lucky you've got 1gb. But if you're doing work on the files back and forth through the NIC you will definitely have contention amongst the packets. If you're really stuck on having multiple NAS devices, install a dedicated Network card in your server to each nas.
Personally I don't see a huge need for a NAS device since my server can easily handle 6 drives, so I have 3.5TB of storage on simple RAID 0 and RAID 5 arrays. Maybe you're warehousing much more videos than I am, but I just watch and delete as much as possible.

[skl111]

I don't record directly to my nas. I record directly to my 5 drives and then after the recordings are converted into a separate drive in one at a time and then transferred to from my server (1GBx2-LACP) to my nas(1Gbx2-LACP with 10TB almost full). And most nas nowadays do not run and 100mb, they are doing 1GB now.

A raid 0 array would work well except if I have a drive failure it's kaput. With the 5 single drives I can lose a drive and still catch shows and only lose the shows off the drive that failed, that weren't transferred over to the nas after conversion. I also don't have to worry about the random reads(The iops i am referring to, one drive is always writing a recording and reading into the converter, and then one is most always writing a recording and reading for comskip, at full bore, 5 writing and 2 of the 5 reading) and fragmentation(as much) with them as much because the data is moved. Raid 10 is what I will move to. But before I had this amount of drives I had 3 drives and RAID 10 wasn't possible and raid 1 was not and option because of the possible loss of disk destroying the whole array.

Even if I might not need it in a few weeks, someone else might be like me and not want the loss of data. It has been a great feature of the STV software I am using now and has saved me loss of a quite a few shows when drives have died.

[Jakesty]

Interesting. I'm not trying to say what you have is wrong, maybe I'll give you a little about my experience for the past 7 years and it might give you some ideas.
Now to be fair, my server is an actual Windows 2003 server. So the booting C: drive is partitioned from a pair of 500gb drives and has 30gb assigned to it. Another 100gb is paired and assigned as RAID 0 and it gives me 200gb of "working" room. The remainder of this drive is just raid 1 and I store pictures etc on it.

Then I have a RAID 5 array of 3 drives (3x1.5TB) in this system which uses the on-board ICH10R chipset, and this is my long term storage. So my process is to record to the RAID 0, perform comskip and compression, and hopefully in the next 'n' number of days I will watch it. If I don't then it gets moved with a script daily to the RAID 5. So the likely hood of losing a drive and hence the recordings is much more limited, and like you mentioned in this config I don't have any real fragmentation.
Another nice thing about the ICH10R is that you can migrate from RAID 1 to RAID 5 without losing any data, adding additional drives too is just as easy. I did and it worked well.

I never want to lose a drive though, even just one, so my real important stuff is always safe. Sure RAID 0 doubles your chances of failure, but there's not that much to lose when it is deleted or move regularly. I've been fortunate, the 500gb pair has never failed me, plain old 7200 rpm WD drives, the RAID 5 (Seagates had a lot of problems with this model) I have lost twice, popped another drive in and I was back in business, even while replicating the parity, it played recordings just fine. I have yet to lose anything since I set up this system 4 years ago.

I've considered RAID 10, but it's got it's own positives and negatives as I assume you know. Higher overhead since you only get 50% of the total storage, but yes it is faster. For me the RAID 5 is certainly fast enough to watch recordings. All with one micro atx motherboard.

But to each his own. HTH, Jake