New Setup - How's it look to you?

[dheinle]

I am in the process of re-doing my SageTv setup. How does this look? Anything I should change?

Current
Server
Dell GX280 sagetv service and sagetv client
P4 3.2ghz w/ hyperthreading
2gb ram
Windows XP SP2
radeon x300 video card
1 x 500 gb os / tv shows
1tb nas movies
1 - PVR - 250 - Dish 322
1 - PVR - 500 only 1 tuner works Dish 622
1 - DVIco Gold USB HD - antenna
USB UIRT tuner
Firefly
S-Video out to RF-modulator to ch 3 to Living room

bedroom sagetv client
Asus M2npv-Vm Motherboard
AMD 64 x2 4000+ 2.1ghz CPU
1gb of ram
Integrated gforce 6150 video
80gb hard drive
Component out to 37" LCD

Home theater
HD100
HDMI to Mitsu projector

NEW Setup
Server / Home Theater sagetv service and sagetv client
32bit XP SP3
Asus M2npv-Vm Motherboard
AMD 64 x2 4000+ 2.1ghz CPU
3gb of ram
Integrated gforce 6150 video
4x1tb raid 5 hard drive, OS / TV / Movies / Etc.
2 x HVR 2250's 2 HD OTA, 2 S-video for Dish
1 Dvico Gold USB - HD OTA
MCE USB Reciever
USB UIRT for dish
Harmony One
Component out to Onkyo tx-sr606 which up-converts to Mitsu projector

Bedroom
HD200
HDMI to 37" LCD

Living Room
HD100
HDMI to 26" LCD


I think I might have to bite the bullet and buy another HD200 for the Home theater. I just really don't want to at this time.

Thanks for any input, I love sage after having BTV for ~5 years.

Dennis

[gplasky]

Nice setup. I would move the server to the basement/closet/another room and go with the HD200 in the living room. My server is in the bsaement and the HD100 in the living room is being replaced by a new HD200. It's more conducive to the listening experience.

Gerry

[Beefcake550]

I'm concerned about how you are doing the raid5. Without a real hardware raid5 card, your write speeds to the disks will suffer tremendously. That is NOT to say it won't be good enough for your needs, but it may be an issue.

Also, I question the ned for RAID5 in the first place for the OS/TV/Movies. Performance-wise, you'd want to seperate as much as possible. 1TB drive for the TV, 2 for the Movies, and the other for OS (make a 64BG partition on the 1TB drive). Use the remainder of the OS drive for more movies.

This way when you have multiple extenders/clients running, there are more "threads" of independent IO going to teh hard drives as a whole. When you make everything a RAID5, you are bottlenecking all IO to go through a RAID5 setup.

I have some personal experience in this. I started out with WHS, moved to RAID, and finally landed on the idea of jsut making each hard drive a seperate share. My throughput is MUCH better with the final setup. It may seem "more clumsy" and "messier", but it certainly performs hella-better than RAID5 or WHS ever did.

Think of it this way. One room wants a DVD and another wants live TV. With your setup, both streams would hit the RAID controller and make the heads ont he HDs seek more sicne it's now trying to read 2 different files on the same volume. With my seperate approach, two independent streams are goign to 2 seperate hard drives and they don't harm each other in any way.

One downside to my approach that I can live with is the abrupt sizing of the TV and Movie collections. Meaing, in the RAID setup, taht all write to one big poola nd can be of any size individually. In my setup, you can imagine a small amount of "unused" space on the TV drive if it isn't full while the Moive drive is packed and needs more room. Of course, this amount of wasted space is small in comparison to the loss of space when using raid5.

Of course, I haven't even touched the idea of data protection in raid5 since I doubt anything in the movie collection of tv recordings would classify as "can't ever lose"

Good luck...

[CollinR]

I prefer all Intel if you want to load up the PCI bus / PCIe bus. Nvidia northbridge is better then Via but still not Intel. Might consider the Abit IP35, nice board and ICH10R southbridge allows for nice storage.

I wouldn't do RAID5 just leave it at 4 basic disks.
Add in a 40-80 whatever GB drive for the OS, also you might consider putting 2 cheap drives in RAID1 and putting the music and photos with the OS there. (rob these from your old systems for now)

Your Firefly and EventGhost is light years better a setup then a Harmony One. I highly suggest you hold off on that purchase!

Take the $ you saved by ditching the MCE IR reciever (which you don't need anyway) and the Harmony One and get anther extender when you can.


Some things you didn't mention are cooling and power. Your server is going to be getting on the big side and these issues need some thought so you have good stability.

[dheinle]

Thanks for the input. I want to use raid-5 for protection and also use this drive setup for backups, itunes library, iphoto library, etc...

I really want to get to just 1 box and then use extenders. I just got my HD200 yesterday, man that thing is small. I think I need to get another one.

Losing the movies is not a big deal, just all the time it took to rip and encode them would be lost. I am not sure I would go back and do that for 200+ movies again.

I need to look at this eventghost thing. I have the harmony one already and it is ok, but I need to get an ir extender for it to control the projector.

I have my PC in the lab at work today, so i will start building it and testing it out.

Thanks for the suggestions
Dennis

[SWKerr]

I have lost data with Raid-5 before. I have had them rebuild fine and also rebuild with files starting above like S missing. I now just backup everyting I would miss across the network to do dedicated backup shares. As long as the place doesn't burn down I should be good.