WHS and Moving Recordings

[PAF]

I've decided to move to the WHS operating system for various reasons.
The problem I am having is the issues with the drive pool clusters and the recommended clusters for sagetv. I know there is a tutorial on how to do this.

Correct me if I am wrong but the only problem with using the drive pool in WHS is when recording shows. So, in theory, by having a single drive for recording (say 500GB) and then off loading recordings when the archiving, the pool shouldn't have a problem with this in playback (it serves only as a playback).

The problem then is to have something to offload those files when instructed... any ideas? I thought of using auto compress but then auto compress cannot preserve the AC3 audio stream... am I right? Is there a way to, rather simply, transcode recordings into the drive pool and preserve the AC3 stream (say with MKV or xvid)? Another method would be to simply move the files but that requires to shut down the service and enable the advanced find. Is there a nice and clean way to "archive" the recordings to a different location while the server is running and replace those paths in the SageTV database? Any help/ideas are appreciated because I can't think of a good method and I really really really don't want to change that drive pool to 64K clusters.

Here are my reasons why I do not want to format the drive pool to 64K clusters.

1. It wastes more drive space. Yes I know drives aren't expensive but with a 1.5TB drive, I already loose space for the MBR and I don't want to loose even more... even if it is "only" 90GB. Make it 6TB and you are loosing 360GB (about 90 full DVDs...)

2. I don't want to go through the extra steps for each drive I add to the pool. I would rather offload the files than mess with the drive pool.

3. WHS was built with 4K clusters by Microsoft... there is something to said about that... because WHS is storage media designed by Microsoft and with the issues in corruption it had, I would rather not mess with the drive pool.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by PAF

Correct me if I am wrong but the only problem with using the drive pool in WHS is when recording shows. So, in theory, by having a single drive for recording (say 500GB) and then off loading recordings when the archiving, the pool shouldn't have a problem with this in playback (it serves only as a playback).

The problem then is to have something to offload those files when instructed... any ideas? I thought of using auto compress but then auto compress cannot preserve the AC3 audio stream... am I right? Is there a way to, rather simply, transcode recordings into the drive pool and preserve the AC3 stream (say with MKV or xvid)? Another method would be to simply move the files but that requires to shut down the service and enable the advanced find. Is there a nice and clean way to "archive" the recordings to a different location while the server is running and replace those paths in the SageTV database? Any help/ideas are appreciated because I can't think of a good method and I really really really don't want to change that drive pool to 64K clusters.

Here are my reasons why I do not want to format the drive pool to 64K clusters.

1. It wastes more drive space. Yes I know drives aren't expensive but with a 1.5TB drive, I already loose space for the MBR and I don't want to loose even more... even if it is "only" 90GB. Make it 6TB and you are loosing 360GB (about 90 full DVDs...)

2. I don't want to go through the extra steps for each drive I add to the pool. I would rather offload the files than mess with the drive pool.

3. WHS was built with 4K clusters by Microsoft... there is something to said about that... because WHS is storage media designed by Microsoft and with the issues in corruption it had, I would rather not mess with the drive pool.

Wrong. Just check the forums for users that didn't format in 64k blocks at first and had nothing but stuttering and bad playback. The 64k cluster is both for recording and playback. SageTV records huge file, especially with HDTV. Theses files can be recorded, watched and deleted constantly. The larger cluster size also lets you get away with not defragmenting the drive. I have recorded with SageTV for over 5 years and never defragmented the drive.

1. The space you lose is not enough to worry about if it gives you stutter free playback.
2. You're talking about one step and less than five minutes for each drive. Again, not a lot of work to make sure your recordings play back flawlessly.
3. What is to be said about the 4k clusters is it is the default for all of the MS OS's and MS wasn't looking at huge recording files being placed on them.

I had ripped DVDs on early on with WHS on a drive that was formatted with 4k clusters and had no problem playing them back. But I did have issues when I tried recordings on there. And you may not at first but you will eventually. And if you have stuttering playback the first thing you'll need to try is playing back from a 64k formatted drive. It actually warns you in the SageTV setup to make sure you're using a recording with 64k clusters. It's there for a reason.

Gerry

[SWKerr]

I did not have any issue with my evaluation copy of WHS formated the default way with duplication on the DVR folder. I ran for about a month and never had any issues. I have 2 HD-PVRs and a HDHR with probably three at a time recordings at times. That said when I built the final server I just followed the 64k guide and all has been well. I kind of doubt you really need it on todays equipment but it would suck to have to fix it later once you fill up the drives. I have pulled a drive from the pool and it takes forever.

One thing I don't really use anymore it the duplicate option. I schedule a backup to separate drives for the stuff I care about. The problem with the duplication is there is no archive. If my kids delete something it get hosed instantly on both drives with no way to restore. I can't seem schedule the backup with WHS though. I can do it manually but I can not set it to backup automatically. I have been using something else instead. I would love to know if someone knows how(or has a plugin) that will schedule a backup of a particular folder to a backup drive on the server.

[rmac321]

I'm a relative SageTV newbie at about 6 months, but I thought I'd throw in my $.02.

I suspect that the 64KB is more important on older/slower systems and systems w/o HD100/200 extenders and is more important on a recording drive than on playback drives. This is of course totally anecdotal, so take it for what it's worth.

My XP SageServer has the 64KB setup for its recording drive. Our separate WHS is an HP EX470 MSS with stock memory and processor used to stream media and backup the rest of our computers. I have not yet bothered to reformat any of its drives to 64KB blocks. I had figured I'd reformat them if we ever had significant glitches, but so far it has not been necessary. It currently has one 500GB (the original drive) and 3 1TB WD green drives. The WHS contains ripped dvds in both video_ts\vob format as well as mkv format. It also has ATSC 7GB/hr recordings waiting to be archived and archived recordings in mkv format.

The only time we have ever seen glitches (other than reception issues) we have been watching stuff stored on the far more powerful XP Server with 64KB formatting. The glitches were traceable to the MediaMVP/transcoding load placed on the server in combination with a comskip job and some other task, like shrinking a file or such.

As an example of how tolerant the WHS box is, I can have my SageServer doing a MediaShrink job on a file that is actually stored on the WHS box, plus a second computer running a second MediaShrink job on another file actually stored on the WHS box, plus the WHS box can be doing daily backups and I can still stream and watch a show stored on the WHS box with no glitches. In fact, at this moment I'm doing 2 remote MediaShrink jobs, plus the laptop I'm typing on is doing a MediaScrape job and I'm watching a stream on the HD200, all on files stored on the WHS box. The only thing to even notice is that the XP SageServer is a little slow because of the shrink job and so I get a spinning circle as I menu around on the HD200.

[gplasky]

From the manual:

Step R2: Partition Block Size Recommendation

Before configuring your TV recording directories, you will be shown a notice recommending
that any drive partition where recordings are to be saved should be formatted with a 64K block
size. This large block size allows the hard drive to read and store the large video recordings files
more quickly. If a small block size is used, the hard drive may not be able to keep up with the
data throughput required to read or store the files quickly enough to prevent stuttering during
playback or recording. To access the 64k formatting option in Windows 2000/XP, you need to
format the partition using Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management >
Disk Management

The 64K block size is the recommendation for the recording drive. As I stated ripped dvd's played fine on my WHS pool drive when the blocks were 4k. The case of stuttering will probably not be noticable until you have a lot or recordings on the drive and you have also deleted many recordings. Eventually the recording file will no longer be able to be saved to the drive in a contiguous manner and will have a difficult time trying to jump all over the drive to read the recordings. The other point is with WHS you will tend to have more drives and a larger total volume of recordings. 10 TB or larger storage volumes are not uncommon in WHS. It would be very much a major pain to find out after 5 or 6 TB of recordings that you would have been better off formatting with 64K blocks when your recordings start to stutter when you're trying to play them back. Plan carefully and up front and do it right the first time. I don't recall ever reading a post from a user that regretted formatting their drives with 64K blocks. I have read many a frustrated user that had stuttering video on drives with 4K blocks whose only cure was to wipe the drive and reformat with 64K blocks.

Gerry

[wayner]

One more $0.02. Initially when WHS came out the conventional wisdow was not to record to drives in the pool. Then a few people tried out things and WHS evolved a bit and the conventional wisdon became - set up a separate TV Share in the pool but don't turn on duplication. Now some people have duplication turned on.

Personally I record to the pool on an unduplicated share. I have 6 drives for a total of 6.2TB of storage. I do use Autocompress (actually the _TRANSCODE command via SJQ) to archive shows to the Videos share which is duplicated. Note that Sage allows you to move files via the Autocopress and still have them show up in TV.