Replacing 1 system drive and 2 video drives

[something fishy]

I have a 40Gig system drive and two 160Gig spanned (JBOD) drives to store recordings on. The spanned drives are on an ACard software raid card that I want to use somewhere else. Could I replace all three disks with a single 400Gig and cut down heat and noise in the box or would I run into I/O and/or fragmentation issues. I only have two tuners but the minimum bitrate that I am happy with is DVD std play.

Apart from neatness is there anything to be gained by partitioning the drive as C (OS) and D (Video) btw?

[stanger89]

As long as you keep your OS and data separate, one drive should be as good as three.

As for partitions, you gain:
Neatness
The ability to run 64k clusters for the media drive (64k clusters are not good for the OS drive)
The ability to easilly backup/image you OS drive
The ability to restore and OS backup/image without disturbing your data
Less fragmentation

[Menehune]

By having two partitions, you can have a small (4G) OS partition and then format the rest of the drive as 64k blocks which will eliminate stuttering and pausing video when you record multiple streams to the drive while playing a video stream. Also by having two (or more) partitions, you can image your OS drive to a faster internal drive and then copy off the image files to your external drive using the slower USB interface.

Personally, I would go with a small 20-40G system drive and a separate 400G capture drive. If the capture drive dies, you don't loose your OS and win.biz files and if the OS drive dies, you don't loose the captured video files and you can quickly restore your machine from the image files.


Darn, Stanger beat me to it and was much more concise than I was.

[mdmint]

Originally Posted by Menehune

By having two partitions, you can have a small (4G) OS partition and then format the rest of the drive as 64k blocks which will eliminate stuttering and pausing video when you record multiple streams to the drive while playing a video stream. Also by having two (or more) partitions, you can image your OS drive to a faster internal drive and then copy off the image files to your external drive using the slower USB interface.

4G OS partition too small! I've found this out the hard way. I setup my 1.5TB RAID5 up 5GB OS/Sage rest 2nd partition for recordings. OS partition running out of space, actually get that annoying pop-up warning. Not even sure I'll have enough space to upgrade to Sage 3.0 when it comes out but will find out! I'd go 10GB if I had it to do over... unfortunately currently have no way to off load the around TB of recorded stuff and re-partition. I'm not about to gamble with utils like partition magic...

[stanger89]

I'm running a 4GB OS partition, and it's been fine, it's a little tight though. 5GB would be plenty for an HTPC though.

[something fishy]

Ok thanks guys. What's the best way to transfer everything across. I was thinking of:
1) Prevent Sage from loading at startup
2) Partition new drive into 10Gig and 390Gig partitions (with 64K clusters as appropriate)
3) Ghost/trueimage (I have both) existing OS drive onto 10Gig partition (and assuming that I don't have to reactivate WinXP)
4) Replace existing OS drive with new drive in SageTV box
5) Copy contents of spanned video drives (presently D:) across to 390Gig partition
6) Remove old spanned drives and reset WinXP drive labelling so that 390Gig partition is D:
7) Re-start SageTV (and restore to auto start)
Will this process keep my library of recorded files intact with all the (wiz.bin stored) info they have at present?

Cheers
Eric

[something fishy]

... Bloody smiley!
That should be D: )

[Menehune]

My win2k Sage server OS partition is 3GB with a bunch of unneeded programs installed-DVD burning software, AV, several browsers, archive copies of previous sage versions.

My XP-Home install on my main machine is almost 10G on a 15G partition.

[Menehune]

Originally Posted by something fishy

Ok thanks guys. What's the best way to transfer everything across. I was thinking of:
1) Prevent Sage from loading at startup
2) Partition new drive into 10Gig and 390Gig partitions (with 64K clusters as appropriate)
3) Ghost/trueimage (I have both) existing OS drive onto 10Gig partition (and assuming that I don't have to reactivate WinXP)
4) Replace existing OS drive with new drive in SageTV box
5) Copy contents of spanned video drives (presently D across to 390Gig partition
6) Remove old spanned drives and reset WinXP drive labelling so that 390Gig partition is D:
7) Re-start SageTV (and restore to auto start)
Will this process keep my library of recorded files intact with all the (wiz.bin stored) info they have at present?

Cheers
Eric

That should work. Make sure to back up the wiz.bin, wiz.bak and possibly sage.properties and sage.properties.backup just in case.