Qs re new SageTV build (server only)

[gplasky]

Glad that worked for you. I did that during one of the WHS betas. So since I was doing a clean install and there was still that bug in WHS where it could delete files it was easier for me to keep the recording drives out of the pool.

Gerry

[S_M_E]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Glad that worked for you. I did that during one of the WHS betas. So since I was doing a clean install and there was still that bug in WHS where it could delete files it was easier for me to keep the recording drives out of the pool.

Gerry

Yeah, I noticed the date of the OP, 03/07. The only difference was that you did the "D Drive" partition of the system drive and I did the pool's "DATA" drives, not the D Drive. I did it basically the same way you did, by quick formatting with the built in Disk Management tool using 64K blocks. Moving the data around was a pain but thankfully I have plenty of free space/drives. I started yesterday and I have a few more hours before it's completely finished.

[bigbill]

Check out the HP ex470 mediasmart server. I have two OTA and 1 HDPVR and it works fine serving my HD200. I was concerned that it only had 512meg and a single CPU but HDrecording doesn't use much in the way of resources.

[psklenar]

Djc208,

If I've got enough storage, I guess I could put my music collection on there (currently only 23GB, living on my main day-to-day PC). The idea of looking at home photo's on the TV has never really made sense to me ... but I only have about 15GB, so I guess I could do that too. My friend (waynedunham, msg #9 up above) has been talking about how I should consider ripping my DVD collection for easy use from w/in Sage, but ... he has been having trouble doing just that and I'm not to sure I really want to spend the time and pay for the storage to hold 300+ DVD's ... that's probably be between 2 & 3 TB just for them and heaven only knows how much time, assuming I could find software that works on the first try.


S_M_E,

So what's your recommendation now? Go WHS with a large enough C: drive to allow "landing" large files and then as many more & as large drives as I can afford to put into the "pool" with 64K blocks, but do not set up the Sage recording share(s) for 'duplication'? If so, that brings to mind another question ... since WSH "manages" the drives in the pool, do I use one or multiple shares for the Sage recordings (currently planned for 3 tuners, although I may add a fourth (a 2nd HD-PVR) in the future)?

Thank you both (and everyone else too!) for your replies,
pat----

[S_M_E]

Originally Posted by psklenar

S_M_E,

So what's your recommendation now? Go WHS with a large enough C: drive to allow "landing" large files and then as many more & as large drives as I can afford to put into the "pool" with 64K blocks, but do not set up the Sage recording share(s) for 'duplication'? If so, that brings to mind another question ... since WSH "manages" the drives in the pool, do I use one or multiple shares for the Sage recordings (currently planned for 3 tuners, although I may add a fourth (a 2nd HD-PVR) in the future)?

Thank you both (and everyone else too!) for your replies,
pat----

Since the November update, the issues with the landing zone and size reporting have been changed. I don't think you need a very large D partition for the landing zone any more, files now go to the pool.

If I were rebuilding a new Sage/WHS box today I'd use a ~250G (500G if you have a *lot* of PC's to backup every night) system drive for the C & D partitions with the C partition resized to ~125G, leaving the rest for the D partition and adding as many "large" drives, formatted to use 64K clusters, as needed. I'd format the pool before adding files to the shares and make sure I always had plenty of free space because recording TV can eat it up. As with my current system, I'd make a new non-duplicated WHS share named SageTV and set Sage to use that share (\\WHS\SageTV) as the recording directory and I'd store ripped DVD's and other archived video in the default WHS "Videos" share sorted by subfolders for DVD rips, home movies, downloaded video, etc. I also keep my music and photos on WHS, also sorted by subfolders, not so much so I can listen/view on the TV (although I can and have) but because WHS also allows remote access, centralized storage, redundant storage and it keeps more free space on my workstations. By storing more on the WHS which is what it's for, it allows me to use smaller drives on my workstations.

[psklenar]

Originally Posted by S_M_E

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. ...

Are these "WHS forums" the official "MS Community forums"? Or someplace else? If I'm going to go this route vs an XP or Vista workstation install (32 or 64-bit)... I'd better start reading up.

Thanks,
pat----

[S_M_E]

WHS Forums:
http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/e...owshomeserver/

My "How to resize the system drive to make C more than 20G." tutorial:
http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/e...-e9ca88691137/

I might write a tutorial on how to convert the WHS pool to 64K clusters, I'm just not sure if I should do that here or there...or both.

[psklenar]

S_M_E,

Thank you very much. I guess it's finally catching up with me ... after all of these years of avoiding a Hotmail acct ... I'm going to end up with a "live.com" account.

Are you serious!? WHS defaults to a 20GB C: (System) drive & you have to 'play games' to get anything larger??? What on earth were the engineers thinking when they coded that!? Sheesh!

One more question (for now) .... If I put two physical drives in the pool, I can carve those up into multiple "shares", right? Based on Djc208 & your comments, I'm thinking of going with ...

Splindle 1 - 250GB, partitioned 125GB each C: & D:
Spindle 2 - 1TB in pool
Spindle 3 - 1TB in pool

Pool partitioned as
\Music = 100GB (duplicated)
\Pictures = 100GB (duplicated)
\Videos = 300GB (duplicated) (would allow for 35+ DVDs if I decide to try that)
\SageTV = 1000GB (non-duplicated, supporting 3 tuners, 1 viewer (at a time))

Would that work? Or should I go with more spindles to to spread things out more?

Thanks,
pat----

[S_M_E]

Originally Posted by psklenar

S_M_E,

Are you serious!? WHS defaults to a 20GB C: (System) drive & you have to 'play games' to get anything larger??? What on earth were the engineers thinking when they coded that!? Sheesh!

Seriously, it used to be 10G during the earlier beta. The reason they give is that they don't want people installing a bunch of apps on WHS, installing almost anything is unsupported. They give the ability to install "Add-ins" but the add-ins are not supported by MS, they're supported by the author.

One more question (for now) .... If I put two physical drives in the pool, I can carve those up into multiple "shares", right? Based on Djc208 & your comments, I'm thinking of going with ...

Splindle 1 - 250GB, partitioned 125GB each C: & D:
Spindle 2 - 1TB in pool
Spindle 3 - 1TB in pool

Pool partitioned as
\Music = 100GB (duplicated)
\Pictures = 100GB (duplicated)
\Videos = 300GB (duplicated) (would allow for 35+ DVDs if I decide to try that)
\SageTV = 1000GB (non-duplicated, supporting 3 tuners, 1 viewer (at a time))

Would that work? Or should I go with more spindles to to spread things out more?

You don't partition the pool, you just create shares in the WHS console. You can't specify the size of a share, it's shared among all shares. So it'd look more like this:

Spindle 1 - 250GB, partitioned 125GB each C: & D:
Spindle 2 - 1TB in pool
Spindle 3 - 1TB in pool

(all shares use all of the free space in the pool)
\Music = (duplicated) WHS default share, already created
\Pictures = (duplicated) WHS default share, already created
\Videos = (duplicated) WHS default share, already created
\SageTV = (non-duplicated, supporting 3 tuners, 1 viewer (at a time)) Created by user
(note: there are other default WHS share too.)

So, no matter what you put in each share, they all have the same free space. When you get low on space in the pool, you can delete files, add another drive or swap a 1T drive for a 1.5T drive, etc...

[psklenar]

Originally Posted by S_M_E

Seriously, it used to be 10G during the earlier beta. The reason they give is that they don't want people installing a bunch of apps on WHS, installing almost anything is unsupported. ...

<sigh> It's just more of the ol' "640KB should be enough for anybody" attitude.

... So, no matter what you put in each share, they all have the same free space. When you get low on space in the pool, you can delete files, add another drive or swap a 1T drive for a 1.5T drive, etc...

well, that seems a little ... random? But, on the other hand, it does make managing space a little bit easier (especially compared to clustered DBMS servers I usually deal with at work ).

Once again, S_M_E, thank you very much for your guidance!
pat----

[S_M_E]

Well not exactly but the fixed 20G limit is a bit unflexible and many WHS forum members have complained about it which is why, of course, I figured out a way around it.

I wouldn't call it random, I'd call it convenient and simple. Remember, theses are shared "folders" in a pool not partitions. You can't fill up just one share and adding more space to all shares is a breeze. I currently have 1.5T free, which is a little much but I know I can add a lot of data to any share(s). I like that the only limit is how much free space I have.

[dravenone]

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.

Am I missing something, I keep my Sage drives out of the WHS storage pool but my client can still see the video, picture, music shares and re-play the content.

I think WHS is an excellent way to go also, for the extra features mentioned. I don't see the point of going through the extra effort of adding the Sage drives to the storage pool. IMO it's faster to keep it out of the pool and easier to config it with 64k blocks. Also, my Sage drives see a lot more action than my WHS data drives, so I prefer to keep them seperate in the event of a failure. I do use folder duplication for data, but I don't want to risk choppy recordings if I replace a drive and WHS starts copying the data back to the new drive and Sage may want to record to it as well.

[CollinR]

20GB is more then twice what I partitioned for Windows on my system.

[S_M_E]

Originally Posted by dravenone

Am I missing something, I keep my Sage drives out of the WHS storage pool but my client can still see the video, picture, music shares and re-play the content.

I think WHS is an excellent way to go also, for the extra features mentioned. I don't see the point of going through the extra effort of adding the Sage drives to the storage pool. IMO it's faster to keep it out of the pool and easier to config it with 64k blocks. Also, my Sage drives see a lot more action than my WHS data drives, so I prefer to keep them seperate in the event of a failure. I do use folder duplication for data, but I don't want to risk choppy recordings if I replace a drive and WHS starts copying the data back to the new drive and Sage may want to record to it as well.

I don't know what you're missing, WHS has default shares for Videos, Photos and Music that you can map to SageTV's import directories. You can set up the same shares out of the pool but why would you? As far as an unmanaged recording share, that's no longer needed either.

If you're setting up a NEW WHS box, the time and effort to use 64K clusters is minimal, it's more time intensive if you already have a populated WHS box but it's still worth it to me because of the ease of adding more free space to the pool and I can see how much free space I have, in all shares, using the console. You can do it any way you like but allowing WHS to manage the drives and pool (other that the cluster size) makes more sense to me. I like that I can use any of the free space for any share and I can add more drives or swap out smaller drives for larger drives easily.

YMMV...

[S_M_E]

Pat:

One more thing, I've rethought my suggestion of 250G split 125/125 for the system drive. The reason being that I only backup 3 workstations and they all have small drives. If a person has more workstations to BU or larger drives, 125 for D may not be enough. I'd now suggest going with a 500G drive with C stretched to 100-150G and the rest will go to D. While that big of a D drive might be overkill, it's better too big than too small for the system drive.

Hope it's not too late...

[psklenar]

Nope. Not too late. Won't be ordering the hardware until Thursday at the earliest (waiting for billing cycle to roll over).

I wasn't planning to back anything up to the server. I have a dedicated external drive I use to do weekly backups of my day-to-day system and beyond that, I have a laptop and a WX station PC that I don't currently backup and hadn't considered doing so. hmmm ... If I want to start doing that, I probably should add a third drive to the pool.

decisions, decisions, decisions. <sigh>

THank you!
pat----

[S_M_E]

Originally Posted by psklenar

Nope. Not too late. Won't be ordering the hardware until Thursday at the earliest (waiting for billing cycle to roll over).

Good, now I don't feel guilty for rethinking the advice.

I wasn't planning to back anything up to the server. I have a dedicated external drive I use to do weekly backups of my day-to-day system and beyond that, I have a laptop and a WX station PC that I don't currently backup and hadn't considered doing so. hmmm ... If I want to start doing that, I probably should add a third drive to the pool.

I strongly suggest letting WHS backup the workstations. WHS backups use Single Instance Storage (SIS (sort of like MS Exchange 2000+ servers do now)) so unless your clients have multiple large full hard drives they shouldn't take up that much space and being able to restore is great. One thing to consider with WHS backups is that the clients *should* be wired to the network, especially for the initial backup. Some people use wireless after that but that's up to you. Also, since PP1, WHS will wake up your clients from standby, if you sleep them, for backup. I never put my clients in standby, I just let the screen saver run. YMMV...

As far as a 3rd pool drive (or 4th or 8th) you can add them as you need them so you can easily start with 2 in the pool. That said, if you *want* 3 drives in the pool, go ahead and start with 4 drives (total) but it's no big deal to add storage later, just don't let the drives get too full before adding more.

[psklenar]

in Motherboard and Processor Recommendation?, which is really about a single machine acting as both client & server, Djc208 writes ...

Originally Posted by Djc208

... But other than comskip processing and transcoding to a placeshifter/extender I don't see the need for a huge processor. ...

Okay ... what about for a pure server? I'll be running SageTV as a service. I'll be running one of the commercial skipping options (running in a near real-time mode) and *maybe* another plug-in or two. Three tuners - either an HDHR or an HVR-2250 plus an HD-PVR (maybe 2 eventually). All viewing will be via HD200's or (*maybe*, *occasionally*) Placeshifter. I can't foresee more than once client viewing at any one time.

So. What's more important - number of cores or clock speed? Would a 2.5GHz quad core be more suited than a dual core 3GHz? Or visa versa? Or does it really not matter?

Thanks,
pat----

[Djc208]

Well you can see in my sig what I'm running on my server, which does about what you're talking about. I run comskip, have a HVR-1600 and an HDHR, one extender, and I'll placeshift on the laptop when I'm away. Otherwise I also use it for shared drives to store photos, music, etc that I want to access from either my desktop or laptop.

Most stuff in Sage used to be single threaded so I'd say speed was more important but I'm not sure any more which would be better. The transcoding app can support multiple cores in the latest Betas, but I don't know if that includes the transcoder for placeshifter or just the one for video conversions. Comskip can also spawn multiple threads, so maybe cores are better than speed now.

My old P4 could comskip mpeg files in about 1/3 to 1/2 the recording time (didn't run them real time), the H.264 stuff I can't get to run properly but it was a lot slower. The C2D handles it better but I haven't measured the difference in the mpeg files.

The only thing it couldn't do was transcode HD (mpeg) to the placeshifter. I haven't tried it with the new CPU yet though so I'm not sure how much HP you need for that. Otherwise the server never brakes single digit CPU load except when running comskip where it would hover between 40~60%. HD transcoding would peg it with no picture on the laptop.

For a server I'd look for the right MB as my primary purchase. As a server you want lots of connections and open ports for expandability. I really wouldn't hesitate to use an AMD setup if you like the MB better.

[S_M_E]

Personally, I'd go with the slightly slower Intel quad core for a server but mainboard choice is imporant, the more SATAII ports the better. While WHS does let you easily swap out any size drive you don't want to have to do that every few months if your library grows. Likewise, you may decide to add more simultaneous clients/sources in the future too. It never hurts to give yourself a little wiggle-room...