Storage Recommendations for Multiple HD Tuners.

[JimmyBalboa]

I know this question has been ask one thousand times. I have spent hours reading the forum, finding so many different recommendations that my head hurts trying to come up with a solution for myself.

I wish to have a single Sage server with two HD-PVRs and two HD OTA tuners on the network (not necessarily hooked up to the server). My dream is to have up to four clients that can watch live HD TV simultaneously each being able to tune in to their own channel (with certain restrictions I know).

My question is, what is the best solution for server storage regarding speed/performance? I am not worried potential data loss because any converted videos will not reside on the hard drive(s) dedicated to PVR recording and playback. I am just worried about having enough hard drive performance for recording/ playback of HD video for multiple clients on a single Sage Server.

I plan to use three Sage HD Extenders and the fourth client will be a PC.

I prefer SAS to NAS. Although I am open to using NAS, it seems to me that NAS offers less performance over directly attached SATA.

Should I go with RAID or can a single SATA hard drive handle that kind of load?

Here are some things I am considering.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816132015

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148240 (ESATA)

The Server is a QUAD CORE 2.4 GHz Vista Ultimate x64 System w/4GB of RAM.

Thanks in advance.

[JimmyBalboa]

A link to an existing post will be fine. I know this is a common question.

[mikesm]

First off, it's perfectly fine to stick all the storage on the same server that sage runs on. No issues with that at all, but if you use a PC client, you will have to set up filesharing and use UNC's for all the file paths. So the server will have to act as a NAS to feed the PC client in any case.

Secondly, the box you outlined for storage should work with the righ disk controller and driver software. I assume you are planning on running some form of windows for the server. In that case, if you plan to do RAID, I would suggest you get a good hardware raid controller, as windows software based riad leaves much to be desired. Software raid under Linux works great, but you don't have the same tuner card support under linux as you do with windows.

A fast CPU is nice, but not needed to serve all these users. More important is the network hardware, and the disk I/O system parameters. If you had 4 HD sources writing at the same time to the disk array and having 4 HD sources being read from the disk array, you could be talking about 20 mbps x8, 160 Mbps, and 20 Mbytes per secs of disk i/o. This would not be anything to write home about for linux, but under windows you need to be careful about how you set up the raid and NTFS filesystems so you don't run into issues.

I assume you have gigabit ethernet from the server to a switch? If so, that should work just fine. And lots of RAM in the server will help too - I would recommend 4 GB since it's overkill and cheap. :-)

You may be better off getting a 5in3 SATA tray that holds 5 SATA disks and fits in 3 5.25" slots on a PC case rather than the external system. It'll be cheaper and be more reliable, and allow you to use the motherboard I/O ports to feed them (the motherboard ports generally do not support port multiplication). I personally stay away from external cases like that one (and rosewill doesn't have a good reputation or this stuff).

thx
mike

[BFisher]

For another perspective...

- I have 4 HD Extenders, 2 MVPs (SD), and placeshifter (on laptop, used when traveling)
- I have 3 HD OTA tuners, 3 "HD" STB tuners (using SVideo - so quality is between typical HD and SD)
- I have about 2.5 TB of storage spread across 3 harddisks, all internal
- I have a Quad Core CPU
- 100MB network on it's own switch
- No raid
- dedicated hard disk for XP and programs
- 2 GB RAM

I have recorded on every tuner and played on every device at the same time while running commercial skipping (dragon global's studio analyzer, limited to 4 simultaneous)... and never seen a hiccup yet.

Server is basically not used for much else... backup all my home PCs daily to it and it's my home automation server (web browser, touchscreens, etc - very simple stuff, all the hard stuff controlled by HomeVision Pro controller)

It doesn't take much server power if you are using extenders to connect to your TVs...

[Olias]

My Sage server has four HD inputs:
1 HD-PVR
1 Intensity Pro
2 ATSC tuners

For viewing I use:
2 HD100's
1 SageTV client PC
1 SageTV Placeshifter (on a laptop)

My recording is done on a pair of non-raided 1TB hard drives.
All of this over a 1Gb network.

While I've never had all four clients running at once, I've never had any bottleneck related issues.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by mikesm

First off, it's perfectly fine to stick all the storage on the same server that sage runs on. No issues with that at all, but if you use a PC client, you will have to set up filesharing and use UNC's for all the file paths. So the server will have to act as a NAS to feed the PC client in any case.

Note that if all the storage is on the server, you don't have to use UNC paths for the recording directories unless the clients need direct access to the files for things like ComSkip, imported hard drive based DVDs, and some other files that need direct access for playback as a few examples. Recordings and most imported media can be streamed via the SageTV server to clients w/o using UNC paths.

- Andy

[JimmyBalboa]

Thanks for the information...

I am going to try using a two drive RAID system for recordings.

I will post back to confirm results/issue.

[JimmyBalboa]

Originally Posted by Olias

My Sage server has four HD inputs:
1 HD-PVR
1 Intensity Pro
2 ATSC tuners

How well does your Intensity Pro work with Sage. I am not impressed with the HD-PVR and would like to get better quality. Is the Intensity Pro the way to go?