Setting up Recording Directories

[Steve52]

If you are going to have seperate and dedicated hard drives in your Sage server computer for SageTv Video recording directories, drives that will be used for nothing else but to store Sage recording in, should these drives that are assigned drive letters by windows (E:, G: ETC) be the directory you assign in Sage setup. OR should you create a sub directory on the hard drive say like E:/SageVideo1 and G:/SageVideo2 for the second hard drive, and set these up in the Sage setup menu? Restated in this example is it better to have your video recording directory E:/ or E:/SageVideo1 or does it make any difference? Your thoughts?

[nyplayer]

This is my setup the last letter in the directory is the Drive. It makes it easier to know what drive the Shared folder is on. PS it is not good practice to write to the Root of a Drive it is much better to create a folder.


directory Shared ........... UNC path in Sage
m:\sageuncm ...........\\sageserver\sageuncm
n:\sageuncn ........... \\sageserver\sageuncn
o:\sageunco ........... \\sageserver\sageunco

m:\importuncm ........... \\sageserver\importuncm
n:\importuncn ........... \\sageserver\importuncn
o:\importunco ........... \\sageserver\importunco

[cslatt]

I always use a subdirectory in case I decide later that I want to put other content on the drive. (Photos, Music, Emulation Roms, whatever)

[mike1961]

Always use a subdirectory. In fact, I think there may be a limit on the number of files you can have at the root. I know it was that way on Win 98 OS but they may have removed it in XP. Also, sometimes it's difficult to map drive letters directly to the root and there are more warnings sharing the root.

As Sage recommends, you should format in 64K clusters. I also have two separate drives; one is for permanent media library music, videos and photos and the other drive is for temporary videos (which is more likely to get fragmented while the other drive stays relatively clean). On the temporary video Z drive I have a shared folder VideoMain for my videos as well as a separate folder for MovieTimes and a separate folder for faxes and another one for shared documents (nothing to do with Sage for that). On the permanent drive I have a folder for MusicArchives, PhotoArchives and VideoArchives. Then in VideoArchives I have subfolders for TV, Movies and Family where Movies has yet more subfolders Adult, Children and TVMovies and then subfolders under that. TV is just TV shows and Family are family videos. All my permanent stuff is in mpeg4 at about 300mb / hour.

Hope that helps,
Mike

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by mike1961

I think there may be a limit on the number of files you can have at the root. I know it was that way on Win 98 OS but they may have removed it in XP.

I prefer using subdirs too, but out of curiosity, I looked that one up last night & almost commented on it... that was a restriction on FAT16, but not for FAT32 and NTFS. FAT16 was limited to 512 root dir entires, but because long filenames used more of the 8.3 entries, you could end up haivng far fewer root file entries available for use. I remember having to help several people years ago when they stored everything in the root & then couldn't save another file.

- Andy