1st Extreme Test tonight, 4 HD's at once

[Batman7349]

Will my system keep up or will it fall down?
7:00 ABC The Bachelor (Really don't care but thought I'd try it.)
CBS The Big Bang Theory - How I met your Mom
NBC Chuck
Fox House
8:00 ABC The Bachelor
CBS Two and 1/2 Men - Worst Week
NBC Heroes
FOX 24
9:00 ABC True Beauty
CBS CSI: Miami
NBC Medium
FOX

4 HD shows recording at a time off 2 HD Homeruns onto a 1.5 Terrabyte drive. Will the system be able to keep up?

[matt91]

4 HD streams onto 1 drive....are you going to be watching anything too?

what about comskip/SA ? running that too?

[sandor]

easy breezy beautiful covergirl.

that is what my nightly recordings look like with a 2.0 ghz core2 and my NAS.

not sure if you are OTA or not, but i am all OTA and recording is a breeze - it is simply writing <19 mbps (approx 2.3 MB/s) per channel, so 4 channels is less than 9.5 MB/s -- dead simple for a modern hard drive.

[evilpenguin]

My guess is that its going to choke.

All 4 of those streams are going to be writing to separate, non sequential, sectors of the hard drive at the same time which is not the same as writing one giant file to the hard drive. Then if you toss in viewing and commercial detection then that's 9 different tasks trying to use the same drive at the same time.

My advice: buy another hard drive. Personally, I aim to have one less drive than tuner otherwise things start getting ugly in terms of UI responsiveness.

[matt91]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

My guess is that its going to choke.

I didn't look at the EPG to verify, but it looks like all 4 tuners will be running from 7pm through 9:59pm. That's three solid hours writing (and perhaps reading too). I think heat alone may be an issue.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

All 4 of those streams are going to be writing to separate, non sequential, sectors of the hard drive at the same time which is not the same as writing one giant file to the hard drive.

What makes you think they'll be non-sequential? Unless the files are preallocated (which would be a bad idea in this scenario), the OS will allocate clusters as needed, generally from the same area of the disk. And the disk controller and drive hardware should optimize the writes to minimize seeking. The individual files will end up non-sequential and fragmented, but collectively, as an interleaved group, I'd expect them to be fairly compact and efficient.

I routinely record three or four HD streams at once to the same disk without issues, usually with one playback stream going as well. However I do not run comskip or anything of that nature while this is going on.

[ace007]

I think as long as Comskip is not trying to run at the same time and you don't try to do a bunch of other stuff like playing HD content it'll be alright.

[Brent]

I run three HD recording streams pretty often, sometimes four. I keep comskip at low priority during primetime for this very reason.

Tonight I'll have all 4 HD tuners and 1 SD running starting at 7pm central. If it chokes I'll let you know, but I've had success with this several times before - all with a single recording drive too. Server has plenty of fans to keep it all cool though.

[Batman7349]

I have comskip turned off from 6:00 until 10:00 to avoid the choke. I had planned on watching one of the streams, I'd guess House, 2 1/2 men, worst week, CSI at the same time. All OTA. I do have an seperate OTA receiver that I use for WAF in case it starts to choke. I put it thru some paces before such as ripping ripping DVD's from two networked computers to the 1.5 that I keep movies on. Or ripping a blue ray and a DVD at the same time. Drive access lite is on straight for 2 hours. No over heating yet. Wish me luck!!

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

I routinely record three or four HD streams at once to the same disk without issues, usually with one playback stream going as well. However I do not run comskip or anything of that nature while this is going on.

Well, its never worked out well for me. My UI starts getting sluggish and often times my recording get broken up into multiple files. I do run live comskip, but as long as Sage doesn't try and overload a single drive (3+ shows) then I don't have any issues.

Currently Sage doesn't handle this very well as I often get 3 shows recording on one drive while my other two sit idle, but Sage Support says they reworked their drive allocation and it should make it into the next beta round.

If this is a dedicated HTPC sitting under a TV then I can understand not wanting multiple recording drives, but if you have this thing crammed into a closet somewhere, it can never hurt to have 1-2 extra drives to spread the work around on.

[sandor]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

My guess is that its going to choke.

... Then if you toss in viewing and commercial detection then that's 9 different tasks trying to use the same drive at the same time...

OP didn't mention any of this though.

[sandor]

Originally Posted by matt91

I think heat alone may be an issue.

if it is a properly designed system heat shouldn't be a problem. we're in the middle of a days long copy of an 8 TB server to a second (new) 22 TB server at work, and the temperature are barely changing - and these are all "off the shelf" sata drives.

[gplasky]

It's the comskip that would cause the issue. I moved comskip off my main server and blackout comskip during primetime. I've had 3 HD streams and 2 SD stream recording all at once with 2 clients (HD100 and HD200) watching recorded material with no issues. When I had comskip running is when the UI would get sluggish. (I also had a slower processor before.)

Gerry

[Batman7349]

Well everything went off without a hitch. I was carefull to change channels right at the time so I would not have to "Catch Up" with the live show. Watched 24 at 5:00 this morning before work and all is well.

[ace007]

UGH.. my HDHR started screwing up during all of my recordings last nice and Sage ended up recording nothing. Restarting the HDHR gets it working again. I have a case opened up with Silicondust. Anybody else having issues lately where Sage will say its recording from the HDHR but in the end it deletes the recording or you end up with a blank recording.

[matt91]

Originally Posted by Batman7349

Well everything went off without a hitch. I was carefull to change channels right at the time so I would not have to "Catch Up" with the live show. Watched 24 at 5:00 this morning before work and all is well.

great, good to hear. to recap, you recorded everything from 7 - 10pm, and watched during that time as well? But didn't comskip until overnight?

good to see a data point at this level.

matt

[matt91]

Originally Posted by ace007

UGH.. my HDHR started screwing up during all of my recordings last nice and Sage ended up recording nothing. Restarting the HDHR gets it working again. I have a case opened up with Silicondust. Anybody else having issues lately where Sage will say its recording from the HDHR but in the end it deletes the recording or you end up with a blank recording.

what versions are you using of Sage and the HDHR driver? if you aren't using the latest, then that's the first step.

[pjpjpjpj]

Getting in late on this thread, but I had almost the exact same thing to report.

2 HDHRs, a 100 Mbps network, one 500 Gb external USB drive recording it all... and a slow old dinosaur of a server (see my sig).

8 pm:
CBS: TBBT, HIMYM
Fox: The Bachelor
PBS: Antiques Roadshow (HD)
PBS: Antiques Roadshow (SD) (the same episode was showing on a different local PBS SD subchannel, but had a different episode description so it recorded too... we were not there to notice).

No comskip or showanalyzer or anything. Just four streams recording, 3 of them HD.

Got home and were going to watch TBBT starting around 8:40 pm (it was done, already into HIMYM)... noticed the recording situation... noticed that Sage menus seemed to be moving a big sluggishly on my HD100... and, realizing that PBS repeats shows ad nauseum, we stopped and deleted both Antiques Roadshows (it's my wife's guilty pleasure anyway... no biggie even if we missed it).

Watched TBBT while still recording HIMYM and The Bachelor... flawless, no issues, both with watching, and later watching the ones that were recording at the time we were watching.

[ace007]

Originally Posted by matt91

what versions are you using of Sage and the HDHR driver? if you aren't using the latest, then that's the first step.

I am running the very latest of everything.. you know how it is.. never done tweaking and updating BETAs

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by ace007

UGH.. my HDHR started screwing up during all of my recordings last nice and Sage ended up recording nothing. Restarting the HDHR gets it working again. I have a case opened up with Silicondust. Anybody else having issues lately where Sage will say its recording from the HDHR but in the end it deletes the recording or you end up with a blank recording.

Happened to me twice, each time after upgrading SageTV. Fixed it the first time be completely redoing the setup. Narrowed it down the second time to fixing it by just running a rescan in Sage.