Will the R5000HD 169time.com products work with SageTV 6.1?

[Ron]

Originally Posted by NEOSG

I agree. Might as well order more drives now:-)

Holy cow. What did I count, about 20 drives? What sort of enclosure do you have these in? How many are internal and how many external? My server has 12 drives.

I see you have several 750s. What kind are you using and have you had any failures?

[NEOSG]

Originally Posted by Ron

Holy cow. What did I count, about 20 drives? What sort of enclosure do you have these in? How many are internal and how many external? My server has 12 drives.

I see you have several 750s. What kind are you using and have you had any failures?

Hi Ron. All drives that are not -int are in single external USB enclosures, standing vertically, with only one half of enclosure on. This allows the drive to breathe. I have them spread apart 3 USB hubs to try and balance things out. I am using Seagates for the 750GB. One of those was DOA, but quickly replaced by Seagate. As far as all the drives, I usually have about 1 fail every year or so. Since I buy mostly Seagate, they have a 5 year warranty, it has not been difficult to get a replacement quickly. Recently had one that was Western Digital fail, and they offered a reasonable upgrade, since it was out of warranty.

[KJake]

Originally Posted by KJake

Success, for now. I was able to cancel the appt for tomorrow and said I'd call back when I get some more time away from the office. Now I have a backup plan at least if the FCC thing drags on. I think I actually have a DCT2000 STB, that's what the diagnostics menu says at least...but no worries there either, Nextcom says DCT2000 series STBs without a firewire port will work.

Got a call today from a local manager asking for the GI number. He's going to see what it will take to set things up locally. He said that the lawyers and whatnot are still figuring out things re: customer owned STBs but he's pretty sure that this is going to happen and wants to make sure that when they say OK that they're ready at the local level.

I haven't won yet, but I definitely got their attention. They've also met their deadline so I will wait to file the formal FCC complaint, etc.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by KJake

Got a call today from a local manager asking for the GI number. He's going to see what it will take to set things up locally. He said that the lawyers and whatnot are still figuring out things re: customer owned STBs but he's pretty sure that this is going to happen and wants to make sure that when they say OK that they're ready at the local level.

I haven't won yet, but I definitely got their attention. They've also met their deadline so I will wait to file the formal FCC complaint, etc.

Excellent! They finally wised up to what the regulations say. Make sure when you talk to them that they need to make sure the policy is well distributed internally to all their systems. After all this hassle, you want to make sure that others, incarcerated in the chains of Charter service everywhere get their legally required capability to add a customer owned box!

Thanks,
Mike

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by NEOSG

Hi Ron. All drives that are not -int are in single external USB enclosures, standing vertically, with only one half of enclosure on. This allows the drive to breathe. I have them spread apart 3 USB hubs to try and balance things out. I am using Seagates for the 750GB. One of those was DOA, but quickly replaced by Seagate. As far as all the drives, I usually have about 1 fail every year or so. Since I buy mostly Seagate, they have a 5 year warranty, it has not been difficult to get a replacement quickly. Recently had one that was Western Digital fail, and they offered a reasonable upgrade, since it was out of warranty.

Why don't you use raid5? With that failure rate, it would give you some redundancy, and also allow you to collapse all those drives to a few volumes, and improve performance to boot?

thanks,
Mike

[NEOSG]

Originally Posted by mikesm

Why don't you use raid5? With that failure rate, it would give you some redundancy, and also allow you to collapse all those drives to a few volumes, and improve performance to boot?

thanks,
Mike

The drives are a mix of PATA and SATA, thus I would need multiple controllers and a handful of new/different external enclosures to handle the connection to RAID cards. If I was to rebuild the server from scratch one day, I might think about it. I think it partially boils down to I am willing to risk the lack of drive for drive redundancy with what I get by spreading the recordings out across so many drives.

Performance has never been an issue due to how I have the drives spread across PATA/SATA controllers and various USB ports. I think I recorded up to 6 or 7 things at one time and 4 or 5 of those were HD

Regardless, thank you for the suggestion

-Scott

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by NEOSG

The drives are a mix of PATA and SATA, thus I would need multiple controllers and a handful of new/different external enclosures to handle the connection to RAID cards. If I was to rebuild the server from scratch one day, I might think about it. I think it partially boils down to I am willing to risk the lack of drive for drive redundancy with what I get by spreading the recordings out across so many drives.

Performance has never been an issue due to how I have the drives spread across PATA/SATA controllers and various USB ports. I think I recorded up to 6 or 7 things at one time and 4 or 5 of those were HD

Regardless, thank you for the suggestion

-Scott

Not necessarily. Linux software raid is very reliable, fast, and doesn't need all the drives on one type of controller. Plus, if you move the raid array's drives to a new system with different controllers, the array will be detected properly and come back up. But the downside is you need linux familiarity, which is not as common as windows...

Thanks,
Mike

[NEOSG]

Originally Posted by mikesm

Not necessarily. Linux software raid is very reliable, fast, and doesn't need all the drives on one type of controller. Plus, if you move the raid array's drives to a new system with different controllers, the array will be detected properly and come back up. But the downside is you need linux familiarity, which is not as common as windows...

Thanks,
Mike

I hadn't thought going to a different system to handle the drives. That would work for everything but the R5000 tuners, as those don't work writing to UNC.

Setting a samba box to host all recording drives except for the R500 drives sounds interesting. Or would you suggest software package under linux to run to have it accessible to the Sage Server tuners for their recording storage?

You thinking a Linux box, using software RAID, but still using all of my current USB enclosures as far as hardware setup?

Off the top of your head, do you know what percentage of drive space I lose for the parity info to be stored on each drive with RAID-5? If I wanted to, can I have more than 1 hot spare?

Thanks,

Scott

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by NEOSG

I hadn't thought going to a different system to handle the drives. That would work for everything but the R5000 tuners, as those don't work writing to UNC.

Setting a samba box to host all recording drives except for the R500 drives sounds interesting. Or would you suggest software package under linux to run to have it accessible to the Sage Server tuners for their recording storage?

You thinking a Linux box, using software RAID, but still using all of my current USB enclosures as far as hardware setup?

Off the top of your head, do you know what percentage of drive space I lose for the parity info to be stored on each drive with RAID-5? If I wanted to, can I have more than 1 hot spare?

Thanks,

Scott

Yes, linux software raid can use all of your existing storage devices and create a migration path for you to remove devices and upgrade them. Almost all major linux distributions today come with samba built in. I use it with a windows domain network at home with a windows server providing authentication, and it works quite well.

Raid 5 typically requires one extra drive to be used for parity. So 3 500 GB drives are used for 1 TB of storage. However, if you had 5 drives, you would still just have 1 drive for parity. Linux RAID and volume management allows you to partitions disks of different sizes so you can raid parts of disks together in different ways. If you had 3 300 GB drives, and 3 500 GB drives, you can partition the the 500 GB drives into 300 GB and 200 GB partitions, raid all the 300 GB drives and 300 GB partitions in a single RAID 5 array, the 3 200 GB partitions into a single RAID 5 array, and then create a single volume that is comprised of both raid arrays as segments but looks like 1 network mountable volume. It's hard to do this with conventional raid hardware.

You can also run raid 6 in linux, where you have 2 parity drives per raid array, so you'd have to lose 3 disks to take the array offline. And you can have not just 1 but n hot spares available that will be brought online automatically in case of a drive fault.

But you will have to have familiarity with linux, and if you aren't that familiar, I would recommend against it. It is very different than windows, and you can get yourself into a lot of trouble with it if you aren't careful.

Thanks,
Mike

[mkanet]

My storage solution is going to be very cheap I dont watch movies more than once. In an extreme case, I'll watch a rerun if it's on. If there are any memorable scenes, I just edit them out and save them in my SageTV imported Movies section.. Also, Ive started collecting HD Music videos from MTV.

[NEOSG]

Originally Posted by mikesm

Yes, linux software raid can use all of your existing storage devices and create a migration path for you to remove devices and upgrade them. Almost all major linux distributions today come with samba built in. I use it with a windows domain network at home with a windows server providing authentication, and it works quite well.

Raid 5 typically requires one extra drive to be used for parity. So 3 500 GB drives are used for 1 TB of storage. However, if you had 5 drives, you would still just have 1 drive for parity. Linux RAID and volume management allows you to partitions disks of different sizes so you can raid parts of disks together in different ways. If you had 3 300 GB drives, and 3 500 GB drives, you can partition the the 500 GB drives into 300 GB and 200 GB partitions, raid all the 300 GB drives and 300 GB partitions in a single RAID 5 array, the 3 200 GB partitions into a single RAID 5 array, and then create a single volume that is comprised of both raid arrays as segments but looks like 1 network mountable volume. It's hard to do this with conventional raid hardware.

You can also run raid 6 in linux, where you have 2 parity drives per raid array, so you'd have to lose 3 disks to take the array offline. And you can have not just 1 but n hot spares available that will be brought online automatically in case of a drive fault.

But you will have to have familiarity with linux, and if you aren't that familiar, I would recommend against it. It is very different than windows, and you can get yourself into a lot of trouble with it if you aren't careful.

Thanks,
Mike

Thanks for he info Mike. My *nix experience involves a little bit of everything except software RAID, lol. Coming from a medium size enterprise network, we always used hardware RAID at the office, and never considered software RAID. I'll give this some serious consideration if/when it somes time for a server upgrade and I free up some hardware to run as a linux disc array off of.

BTW, any particular distro your fond of. At work we are strictly Red Hat Enterprise, but I don't see paying sub fees at home.

[hemicuda]

I've had 3 different releases of slackware and it seems to get better every release; new features, options, and such. On the note of samba the best I've ever gotten out of network transfers, reported by task manager, is 54% of the total network bandwidth. If your iptables gets cluttered that % goes down fast.

I used to use hardware raid (megaraid 438 pci card) that supported a total of 45 drives across 3 chains. The cost of u2w scsi drives makes those cards cost prohibitive.

ok, I'll not drag this discussion any further OT. Time for a new thread maybe?

[KJake]

Originally Posted by NEOSG

... R5000 tuners, as those don't work writing to UNC.

Oh really? Drat, I hadn't planned for that. My server is upstairs with all the storage and I planned on putting my DCP501 downstairs since it is huge. I guess the only way around this is to have the R5000 record to the local drive of the computer downstairs, map a drive on the server with the same letter and add that drive to the Sage config as video storage...right? Anyone know if Nextcom is planning to support UNC in the future?

[NEOSG]

Originally Posted by KJake

Oh really? Drat, I hadn't planned for that. My server is upstairs with all the storage and I planned on putting my DCP501 downstairs since it is huge. I guess the only way around this is to have the R5000 record to the local drive of the computer downstairs, map a drive on the server with the same letter and add that drive to the Sage config as video storage...right? Anyone know if Nextcom is planning to support UNC in the future?

I can only speak from my own and a couple of others who tried to use UNC paths on the same server that was acting as the SAGE server. Recording seemed OK, but as soon as we went to watch the currently recording stream (= to live tv also) from a client, the R5000 app ate up 100% cpu

[KJake]

Originally Posted by NEOSG

...tried to use UNC paths on the same server that was acting as the SAGE server

Ah, OK. I won't be doing that, and I don't watch LiveTV much. I'll report if UNC works when the R5000 is on a "client". (I expect it will be two weeks before I have my R5000 hooked-up though).

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by KJake

Oh really? Drat, I hadn't planned for that. My server is upstairs with all the storage and I planned on putting my DCP501 downstairs since it is huge. I guess the only way around this is to have the R5000 record to the local drive of the computer downstairs, map a drive on the server with the same letter and add that drive to the Sage config as video storage...right? Anyone know if Nextcom is planning to support UNC in the future?

I don't understand this. My R5000 works great, and it's writing all it's data to a UNC destination. My sage server has no mass store on it, but it writes ALL recorded and live video to a terabyte raid volume on a linux server.

My clients all read data from the UNC volume too.

Thanks,
Mike

[NEOSG]

Originally Posted by mikesm

I don't understand this. My R5000 works great, and it's writing all it's data to a UNC destination. My sage server has no mass store on it, but it writes ALL recorded and live video to a terabyte raid volume on a linux server.

My clients all read data from the UNC volume too.

Thanks,
Mike

I wonder if having the R5000 writing to a UNC volume that is NOT on the Sage Server is what makes the difference. Thank you for adding that in, as I sure it will help clarify things for others.

[mkanet]

I finally got the chance to alter my setup to accomodate on demand recording. Pretty sweet. I'm now recording Howard TV at 1080i.

It's a little tricky when having two boxes though. Also, for some odd reason, the only way to "tune in" to the on Demand channel that the cablebox is currently on; is to put it on any cable channel on the Guide EXCEPT for the On Demand channel 1.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by NEOSG

I wonder if having the R5000 writing to a UNC volume that is NOT on the Sage Server is what makes the difference. Thank you for adding that in, as I sure it will help clarify things for others.

I don't see why that would make any difference. Are you sure you're permissions are set right? I make sure that sage server, the clients, and the NAS all run under the same username with the same password.

Thanks,
mike

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by mkanet

I finally got the chance to alter my setup to accomodate on demand recording. Pretty sweet. I'm now recording Howard TV at 1080i.

It's a little tricky when having two boxes though. Also, for some odd reason, the only way to "tune in" to the on Demand channel that the cablebox is currently on; is to put it on any cable channel on the Guide EXCEPT for the On Demand channel 1.

Interesting. There should be a "On demand" button the remote that should take your directly there. All my STB's remote's have that button.

Did you do it the way we discussed on this thread using manual recording mode?

PS You will have to block the IR from hitting multiple boxes at once. They all respond to the same IR codes, which could yield a LOT of confusion.


Thanks,
Mike