Recording right to NAS, best practices?

[kbyrd]

I apologize is I'm asking a question with an obvious answer or one that has no obvious answer but has been beaten to death.

I'm a sagetv and video newbie, but a very experienced Linux user and I'm really familiar with networking, filesystems, and storage.

My setup is:
- Linux running Samba serving an a XFS filesystem on a single (for now) 500GB drive.
- WinXP running SageTV, single drive for the OS and apps only. The recording directory is on a mapped drive from the Samba server.
- GigE networking between the two, through a switch.

It's all consumer-y stuff, no enterprise grade gear.


So, I've had a SageTV setup on WinXP for a month or so now, writing to local storage. I recently moved the storage to the Linux box, mapping a drive on the SageTV box. The next day, I noticed that shows recorded to the mapped drive have chunks missing. Usually it's just a few fractions of a second scattered out over an hour show, but in one case a total of 1minute (in smaller chunk) was missing. I know it's happening on the recording because I can play back the section and it skips in exactly the same way every time. The first time I noticed it I figured I had caused it by running a drive to drive copy on the file server and that was interfering with the writes from Sage. But it happened again last night and absolutely nothing was going on.

There's nothing else going on over the network, there's nothing else going on with either the WinXP or Linux box. I'm just playing around, setting things up, so I've done no optimizing. Testing with hdparm locally the Samba server's drive does 70MB/s. Network utilization while recording (dual SDTV tuners) on the SageTV box is way below either GigE or the measured local drive speed.

I see people mention that they do this and I didn't find a lot problems. Eventually I'll move to software RAID with more drives, but I figure that my current setup should be able to handle recording one or two SDTV streams.

Any ideas on what's going on? I haven't spent much time debugging, I wanted to write here first and hope I find a "Hey dummy! You need to do XYZ!" before I dig into it over the weekend.

[kbyrd]

It turns out that a single slow drive over samba didn't work so well. Multiple reasonably modern drives in RAID5 works fine.