Qs re new SageTV build (server only)

[psklenar]

Now that the HD Extenders are back in stock, I've ordered three and am now updating my proposed SageTV server design. A long time SageTV running friend has told me that none of the Sage s/w is currently 64-bit. But I still wonder if a 64-bit OS wouldn't make sense in that I could then run more than 3GB of memory and different processes (SageTV, ComSkip, etc) could each have up to their 32-bit 3GB limits. Does this make sense?

Current plan -
+ Server in basement where cables enter house.
+ HD200's at each of the three HD TVs.
+ Server: 2.5GHz Quad Core, 64-bit Vista (Basic?), 8GB RAM, 4x500GB HDs, low end ATI video card (I figure I don't need anything powerful since this will be server only) and 365w 82% efficient P/S.
+ Tuners: 1x HDHR, 1x HD-PVR

Is 64-bit & 8GB RAM overkill for server only SageTV & plug-ins?
I thought 4x 500GB spindles would be better for I/O than 2x 1TB? Thoughts?

Thank you,
pat----

[CollinR]

If you didn't use Vista 2GB would be plenty.

I have 3 clients and 10 sources and have not broken 1GB consumed by much and it's rare if ever at that. Mine usually runs right around the 1GB mark.

You logic on 4 500GB drives being better then 2 1TB drives is sound and a wise design choice.

[psklenar]

CollinR,

Thanks for the quick reply. I have an XP Home (32-bit) license that I could use if 3GB will be enough memory. But since I couldn't find any one offering a 64-bit XP license last night, I figured if I wanted more than 3GB of memory, I need 64-bit and therefore would be stuck with Vista (only willing to risk it is that it'll be all new, current hardware, would never consider it for a box upgrade).

Thanks for the feedback on both the OS and the drives questions!
pat----

[CollinR]

Yea just go with your home license and if you ever have to you know you can upgrade.

If this is a headless server stuck in a cabinet like mine you really get nothing but PITA from running Vista. SageTV running in java couldn't care less which OS you use. However the plugins and all the misc wares and drivers that go with them have much broader XP support.

[vhurst]

IMHO, Windows Home Server is the best OS to use, if your building a server only system. The added bennefits of a nice backup system for your home machines is sweet, as well as a free domain name (great for placeshifter), and remote desktop access to all your home machines, redundant network drive storage, and perhaps a print server. You can even set up the server with a DVD drive, ImgBurn, DirMon2, and the propper plugin, and have a server that'll burn your keeper shows you may want to share to DVD. Just leave a blank in the drive, and pick "burn to DVD" from the sage menu. Done. It just makes that money your spending on powering a machine full time much more usefull.

I'd go with 1Tb drives for the video recording storage. The demand on drive speed for Sage is small. Room to grow your drive space is the bigger picture.

Be aware WHS requires 120Mb (something like that?) minimum for the install, and additional drives to grow your shared folders with redundancy. You'de want to keep the 1Tb drives as seperate storage from the WHS drives. So you'll be looking at 4 drives to start with, for the optimum setup. Say perhaps 2 x 500Gb for WHS, and 2 x 1Tb for Sage.

[waynedunham]

One thing Pat forgot to mention (I'm the guilty party for getting him interested in the first place) is that he's going to want to be doing commercial marking while shows are recording.
I realize there's no big overhead for comskipping SD and even the HDHR files but when they finally get commercial marking programs (either comskip,or ShowAnalyzer) that work with the HD-PVR files it may become a factor. It seems like what little I've read about the Comskip Beta for .ts files it seems to want a good processor and memory.

Vhurst makes a good argument for going with WHS as the OS. I've seen others suggest that too. I forgot all about that when making suggestions to Pat.

I currently do 2 ShowAnalyzer instances while recording on my lowly P4 2.8ghz with 1gig ram. I can easily record through 2 PVR 500's (4 tuners), my HDHR (2 tuners) and my HD-PVR while also commercial marking 2 shows as they record. (2 SATA 1 drives with the HD-PVR as well as one of the HDHR tuners locked to one drive . The other HDHR tuner is locked to the other drive and I let the PVR-500's go wherever Sage desires to put them) OS/Sage is on a separate partition on one of the drives.

I will also be building a rig very similar to what Pat is building. I plan on adding a 2nd HDHR and possibly a 2nd HD-PVR while pulling at least one of the PVR-500's off the machine. I could probably lose the other PVR-500 is someone would teach the networks how to tell time and stop starting shows at 8:03 and stopping at 10:02. Remember the good old days when shows started a x:00/x:30 and ended at x:59/x:29? <sigh> Then TBS came on the scene and insisted on starting everything at x:05/x:35. It took a while, but within a few years other networks started losing the ability to tell time too.

[S_M_E]

Originally Posted by vhurst

IMHO, Windows Home Server is the best OS to use, if your building a server only system.

Be aware WHS requires 120Mb (something like that?) minimum for the install, and additional drives to grow your shared folders with redundancy. You'de want to keep the 1Tb drives as seperate storage from the WHS drives. So you'll be looking at 4 drives to start with, for the optimum setup. Say perhaps 2 x 500Gb for WHS, and 2 x 1Tb for Sage.

I like WHS for Sage too.

I was a WHS beta tester and I'd have to disagree with your suggestion. With a four drive WHS box, used for SageTV, I'd go with one 500G for the system drive and put three 1T (or the newer 1.5T) in the storage pool. I use a WHS "SageTV" share for my recorded TV (not duplicated) and I use the default "Videos" share (duplicated) for ripped DVDs, etc. My current WHS/Sage box uses 7 drives and my system drive was stretched at install time using an unsupported workaround (you can find my tutorial for that on the WHS forums) so I could have a larger "C Drive" to install more SW.

Some people claim that the SageTV video folder should be outside of WHS but I disagree. I've never had any issue with Sage recording to a *non-duplicated* share. The problems occur when you record to a duplicated share and WHS tries to duplicate the file being recorded before it's finished being recorded.

I do suggest turning off the folder duplication for the share that Sage records to. You can also "Configure Media Center Import Directories" to use the Videos/Music/Photos shares from WHS for use with SageTV.

Hope that helps...

[vhurst]

Sure, using WHS share folders with duplication turned off will work fine, and the integration with the WHS video/pitures/music folders would be slick too. The only down dise is not having the added efficiancy of 64K blocks for your video partition. When you use WHS share folders, you loose control of the formatting. It won't hurt things operationally.

I also highly recomend a multi-CPU motherboard, or multi-core CPU. When I used to run a single CPU, ComSkip would cause sluggish Sage menu operation when it was working, even with low priority set. Now that I'm running a a dual P3 1.4G server, the system runs smooth. I can't use my HDHR tuner, as I'm still SD at home, and watch on an Hauppauge MVP. My server doesn't have the power I need to convert HD recordings to SD on the fly. Someday I'll get a Sage HD Theater box, and the problem will be solved.

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by vhurst

I also highly recomend a multi-CPU motherboard, or multi-core CPU. When I used to run a single CPU, ComSkip would cause sluggish Sage menu operation when it was working, even with low priority set. Now that I'm running a a dual P3 1.4G server, the system runs smooth. I can't use my HDHR tuner, as I'm still SD at home, and watch on an Hauppauge MVP. My server doesn't have the power I need to convert HD recordings to SD on the fly. Someday I'll get a Sage HD Theater box, and the problem will be solved.

Prior to getting my 2nd HD Extender I was running an MVP in the bedroom. As long as Comskip (I use ShowAnalyzer) wasn't running I could transcode HDHR recordings to standard (or whatever the lower quality is called) quality with my P4 2.8ghz HT cpu with 1 gig ram. Even with nothing else running besides Sage itself I couldn't get high quality transcoding to work on that cpu/ram combo. Although, that was still back when I was running SageTV instead of just the service so that may or may not have made a difference.
Of course now I don't use an MVP at all so transcoding isn't an issue any more.

[S_M_E]

Originally Posted by vhurst

Sure, using WHS share folders with duplication turned off will work fine, and the integration with the WHS video/pitures/music folders would be slick too. The only down dise is not having the added efficiancy of 64K blocks for your video partition. When you use WHS share folders, you loose control of the formatting. It won't hurt things operationally.

Also unsupported but some WHS people are using Acronis (etc) to convert drives to 64K blocks; I've never had a problem with the default block sizes for my WHS drive pool. That said, my server isn't very stressed either; I just have two analog tuners and I only use one Sage client over Gbit Ethernet so 64K blocks might be more important to others than it is to me. My drives MIGHT wear out faster using the smaller blocks but since they're all in the pool, they're easy to replace. I also suggest backing up non-duplicated shares to another drive or share on a regular basis.

YMMV...

[CollinR]

Originally Posted by S_M_E

That said, my server isn't very stressed either; I just have two analog tuners and I only use one Sage client over Gbit Ethernet so 64K blocks might be more important to others than it is to me.

If I had a single 4k cluster I would be eating HDDs left and right, if it functioned at all. Even with 64k and 4 disks I can run out of IO on occasion due to fragmentation from rolling the data over so much. It's the head seek that gets you not the transfer rates and damn sure not the rating of the connection.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by S_M_E

Also unsupported but some WHS people are using Acronis (etc) to convert drives to 64K blocks; I've never had a problem with the default block sizes for my WHS drive pool. That said, my server isn't very stressed either; I just have two analog tuners and I only use one Sage client over Gbit Ethernet so 64K blocks might be more important to others than it is to me. My drives MIGHT wear out faster using the smaller blocks but since they're all in the pool, they're easy to replace. I also suggest backing up non-duplicated shares to another drive or share on a regular basis.

YMMV...

If you're only doing a few recordings and deleting them after watching you probably won't see issues right away. But as you do more and store more and start recording HD you'll begin to see stuttering issues. At that time you'll want to reformat your drives with 64k blocks. I run WHS and all of my recording drives are 64k outside the pool.

Gerry

[S_M_E]

Originally Posted by CollinR

If I had a single 4k cluster I would be eating HDDs left and right, if it functioned at all. Even with 64k and 4 disks I can run out of IO on occasion due to fragmentation from rolling the data over so much. It's the head seek that gets you not the transfer rates and damn sure not the rating of the connection.

I guess that's why some WHS people are using Acronis (etc) to convert the block sizes. Like I said, my drives might wear out faster with smaller blocks but, with my usage, the block size doesn't affect my performance so far.

My SageTV share only has ~160G of TV recorded, my Video share only has ~380G (plus duplication) in it and even with all of my "other" storage needs I still have ~1.5T free so I'm OK for a while.

[psklenar]

Okay. So ...

One recommendation for a brand new build is HWS instead of 32-bit XP or 64-bit Vista. Is it safe to assume WHS is a 32-bit OS?

Another recommendation is larger drives vs more smaller spindles.

Was already planing to go with the Q9300 (I think, it's the 2.5GHz quad-core, 45nm, low watts) Intel CPU.

So my next question is ... what are "drive pools"? Are they s/w RAID arrays? Or "merely" logical collections of drives (i.e.; dynamic drives vs basic)? Or ... ? Can anyone point me to a good resource for reading up on this and making sure i do it right the first time?

Thank you!
pat----

[jm9843]

Originally Posted by psklenar

Is it safe to assume WHS is a 32-bit OS?

You are safe to assume that. WHS is 32-bit Windows Server 2003 under the hood.

Originally Posted by psklenar

So my next question is ... what are "drive pools"? Are they s/w RAID arrays?

When you connect a hdd to WHS (any # or combination of sata,esata,usb,firewire,etc.), you can "add" the drive to the storage pool so that it is managed by the WHS disk migrator service. This creates a pool of all of your storage that users access by shares that you create. Duplication can be enabled on a per share basis and is essentially a software raid 1 (mirrored). This can all be accomplished via the WHS administrator console that is installed on one of your clients. MS published a white paper on how the disk migrator service works.

The thing to remember is that the WHS OS is installed on it's own physical disk that is not part of the drive "pool". Any data that a user copies to a disk migrator managed share will first land on that physical disk. The disk migrator service will then kick in and move the data to drives in the pool as it sees fit. Because of this, the size of your OS disk will determine the largest copy that you can do to a WHS share. It is recommended that the OS drive be at least 500 GB.

When users talk about adding an unmanaged recording drive for SageTV, it is a drive connected to the WHS that you haven't added to the drive pool. The advantage is for performance reasons: you can rdp to the WHS and format the drive with 64k blocks and the disk migrator service won't interfere while Sage is recording to the disk.

I currently have the following drives as part of my WHS setup:
500 GB sata -> OS/installed programs/landing zone
300 GB sata x 4 -> WHS pool
1.5 TB sata -> dedicated SageTV recording outside of WHS pool
1 TB usb -> to use with WHS "backup" feature for offsite backups of WHS shares

[psklenar]

This server is going to be purely for Sage. I won't be hosting shares or anything else for the house network. I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to simply stick with XP (a buddy found Pro 64-bit for me - allows ability to add mem if needed later) and multiple spindles ... hmmmm.

pat----

[S_M_E]

After downloading the Acronis Disk Director Server trial, I would not suggest converting the default 4k blocks to 64k blocks. If you have one or more HD streams, use an unmanaged disk with 64k blocks on WHS. I'm glad that I don't have performance issues but that may change when I eventually go HD...

WHS is much more than a sage server, it includes back-ups and shares (although people don;t have to use them) so if ALL you want to run is SageTV, then XP is pretty chep and still supoprted, by MS, so far. x64 will allow you to add more memory but Sage isn't 64bit (yet? never?) so it's up to you...

[Djc208]

What about photos, music, and DVDs? If the server is going to host these you'll want to set that drive up as a share. I have most of my recording drives mapped to my desktop so I can copy them to my laptop for travel, or transcode them on my faster desktop system for storage or download to a portable media player, etc.

This is where WHS would be handy. A pair of say 500 GB HDDs in the pool would let you keep all those files, with important stuff like pictures replicated across the drives. Then the Sage HDDs would set outside the pool.

WHS also has a top notch backup program for other systems on your network as well as allowing remote access via the web. I haven't broken down and purchased the software but it would be my choice if I had to buy a new OS for my server.

I wouldn't use XP-64 bit. It never really had the driver support that the 32-bit version needed. Vista-64 is almost there but it creates it's own problems.

If all you're doing is running Sage as a service, and it's supporting items (transcoding/conversion/comskip), you shouldn't need 4/8/16 GB of RAM. One would be fine for XP.

I have an XP Pro server with a pair of recording drives and then a pair of smaller drives that are RAID 1 (mirrored) and set up as a share for photos, music, videos, etc, with a partition for the OS carved out of them. It gives me the protection of my important photos and the OS and is stable enough. I used an old PATA drive as a reserve and have my backup program dump the important stuff onto it periodically for extra safety.

[S_M_E]

I agree with djc208, I just used WHS to restore my XP box from an older backup to fix a Windows Installer problem that I was having. The restore was relatively painless and having duplicated shares for all of my music/photos and other apps that I want saved makes WHS as much of a "must have" in my house as SageTV. Combining the two just makes sense.

YMMV...

[S_M_E]

Originally Posted by gplasky

If you're only doing a few recordings and deleting them after watching you probably won't see issues right away. But as you do more and store more and start recording HD you'll begin to see stuttering issues. At that time you'll want to reformat your drives with 64k blocks. I run WHS and all of my recording drives are 64k outside the pool.

Gerry

Interesting, I just found a way to convert my WHS pool to 64K clusters, with no errors, thanks, in part, to one of your older posts on the WHS forums. Now I'm in the process of moving my data back to the pool and then I just have to convert one more drive and then enable duplication on some of my shares.