Hard drive speed to support multiple tuners

[dgage]

I am looking at setting up multiple PVR-250s to record shows at the same time. I am also looking at getting a large drive to store the videos. Density is important to me so I am looking at the largest which is 250 GB at 7200 rpm and 300 GB at 5400 rpm. Will a 5400 rpm drive support multiple tuners, say 3, recording at the same time? Thanks.

David

[fidget]

What are the seek times on these drives? Assuming that you are recording at DVD standard (3.25 GB/hour, max) and have 64 KB blocks, it would take you about 67 milliseconds to fill a block. To determine how many streams you can have at once, divide your seek time plus latency into 67 milliseconds. Unfortunately, you will usually see the average seek time but you should be able to find the worst case as well (you may need to go to the manufacturer's web site).

This is not exact, since the cache size will help, but it will give you a rough idea. On my 7200 RPM drive, I have recorded three programs and played back a fourth without any problem. My rough calculation says that I should be able to have five streams going (total) without any problem. The smaller your block size, the more likely that you will have to do more seeks to read in the same amount of information.

[dgage]

Here are specs for the Maxtor 300 GB 5400 rpm drive with 2 MB cache.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...pa=1&section=2

If it matters, I would be using WinXP with NTFS.

I might also want to stream (play) multiple files at the same time using MediaMVPs (or similar) so I should probably go with a 250 GB 7200 rpm drive with 8 MB cache. Thanks.

David

[Deadbolt]

Quick question related to hard disks:

Can I use multiple hard disks in Sage to store my shows without having to use RAID 0?

Thanks,
Deadbolt

[fidget]

Originally posted by Deadbolt
Quick question related to hard disks:

Can I use multiple hard disks in Sage to store my shows without having to use RAID 0?

Thanks,
Deadbolt

Yes. Just make sure that you add each drive to your list of video directories (Setup->Detailed Setup->General). I have two hard drives in my list, one on my local machine and one on a remote machine.

[ErsatzTom]

When you have multiple drives will Sage fill one drive up before moving on to the next or will it try to do simultaneous recordings to separate drives to maximize throughput?

t

[fidget]

As far as I can tell, the drives are filled in the order they are specified in the list. Since I have a remote encoder, I would really like to be able to assign a target directory for each encoder (i.e., make sure that each encoder uses the local hard drive).

[Deadbolt]

Thanks Fidget!