Is this possible (24 Tuners)???

[medialivingroom]

I would like to know if this is possible?

Can I first have a ATX Pentium 4 MB with 5 PCI slots.

In each PCI slot I put (5) Belkin Hi-speed USB 2.0 5-Port PCI Card.

Then connect (4) WinTV-PVR-USB2 in each PCI board and (4) to the USB connectors on the MB?

Can I have 24 tuners going at the same time?

Then I could have (4) 250 GB IDE Drives and (6) 250 GB SATA Drives for a total of 2.5TB of Video.

I would also get a 450 watt Large Power supply and MB that could handle atleast 4 IDE drives and 6 SATA drives. Maybe an Abit IC7-MAX3....


[FONT=courier new]
Unit Price Amount Extended Price
Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz 800MHz 3GHz/512K/800MHz 478 pin $189 1 $189
Abit IC7-MAX3 $177 1 $177
Antec SX1040BII PC Case $119 1 $119
512MB PC3200 400Mhz DDR SDRAM 184pin memory $79 1 $79
Sapphire Radeon 9200SE 64MB DDR AGP 8X w/ CRT & TVO Video Card $40 1 $40
Maxtor 7Y250P0 250GB Ultra ATA133 7200RPM 8MB Hard Drive $234 4 $936
Belkin Hi-speed USB 2.0 5-Port PCI Card $45 5 $225
Maxtor 7Y250M0 250GB Serial ATA 7200RPM 8MB Hard Drive $249 6 $1,494
HAUPPAUGE 941,WINTV PVR USB2 $193 24 $4,620


$7,879

[fidget]

I think that the PCI bus can keep up, but I would have concerns about the hard drive. It looks as if you could be recording 70+ GB/hr (or 24 MB/second). Considering that your HDD has, at best, an 8 MB cache I would bet that it would become the bottleneck.

[medialivingroom]

Originally posted by fidget
I think that the PCI bus can keep up, but I would have concerns about the hard drive. It looks as if you could be recording 70+ MB/second. Considering that your HDD has, at best, an 8 MB cache I would bet that it would become the bottleneck.

So, you think that with all 24 tuners running and with 10 Hard Drives that Sage will not figure it out? What is I lowered the data rate to 1.8GB per hour (low DVD)?

[EncoderHouse]

Sure go for it and tells us how it works. I would go the other way, with an industrial SBC (Single Board computer) and put it in a 20 slot PCI backplane. It’s easier and cheap to do it this way.
try calling Jay or CS @ www.armorlink.com

[fidget]

Originally posted by medialivingroom
So, you think that with all 24 tuners running and with 10 Hard Drives that Sage will not figure it out? What is I lowered the data rate to 1.8GB per hour (low DVD)?

I don't know if you can sufficiently split your shows across the 10 HDDs. It would be nice if you could assign a tuner to a specific HDD, but that isn't possible.

SageTV will try to keep your HDDs equally empty. This means that if you have a 120 GB HDD and an 80 GB HDD, it will put 40 GB to the 120 before it starts to record to the 80. Since you will be deleting programs, it will be almost impossible to keep the drives balanced.

EDIT: Slowing down to 1.8 GB/hr will result in 12+ MB/sec of writing.

[medialivingroom]

Originally posted by EncoderHouse
Sure go for it and tells us how it works. I would go the other way, with an industrial SBC (Single Board computer) and put it in a 20 slot PCI backplane. It’s easier and cheap to do it this way.
try calling Jay or CS @ www.armorlink.com

Oh even better, PX-20S3 with 18 PCI slot, then I can buy 18 ATI PCI TV Tuner Box, Model "E-HOME WONDER" at $64 each

[stanger89]

Originally posted by fidget
I think that the PCI bus can keep up, but I would have concerns about the hard drive. It looks as if you could be recording 70+ GB/hr (or 24 MB/second). Considering that your HDD has, at best, an 8 MB cache I would bet that it would become the bottleneck.

Modern HDDs (say those 200Gb+) are easily capable of transfer rates of over 50MB/sec, although the additional latencies of trying to divide that up among 24 streams it could run you into bandwidhth limitations.
http://storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php

Of course, if you need more performance, you could build a RAID array on one of these:
http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata9000.asp
100MB/sec write, 400MB/sec should be plenty. Oh, and 1Gb of onboard ram wouldn't hurt either.

[TunaBoo]

This will not work. Too many streams and too much thrash for a smooth recording. The PCI bus on a normal PC can NOT handle 24 or whatever.

For this project you need a beefed up motherboard with 64 bit pci slots, and most likely dual processors, and a SCSI raid 5 array. You are looking in the 15k range when all said and done...

[krutaw]

Originally posted by medialivingroom
I would like to know if this is possible?

Can I first have a ATX Pentium 4 MB with 5 PCI slots.

In each PCI slot I put (5) Belkin Hi-speed USB 2.0 5-Port PCI Card.

Then connect (4) WinTV-PVR-USB2 in each PCI board and (4) to the USB connectors on the MB?

Can I have 24 tuners going at the same time?

Then I could have (4) 250 GB IDE Drives and (6) 250 GB SATA Drives for a total of 2.5TB of Video.

I would also get a 450 watt Large Power supply and MB that could handle atleast 4 IDE drives and 6 SATA drives. Maybe an Abit IC7-MAX3....

Umm.. okay... what the heck? I mean.. okay... yeah.. no.. not okay! lol

I... just ... can't... answer... seriously...

Seriously though, I think that by the time you got all of those devices to work together SAGETV v3 will be fully deployed. If you think some of the people in the forums have problems with 2 tuners, multiply those problems by 12.

[Crowdx42]

12 tuners would be possible by using 4 boxes, each with 3 PVR 250 cards, using Sage recorder and then a client machine. Would not be very expensive and it would allow 12 simultaneous shows all onto their own hard drives if needed.
Easy
Patrick

[edmc]

fidgit> I don't know if you can sufficiently split your shows across the 10 HDDs.

Easy - stripe the 10 HDDs into a single Volume. Consider RAID-5, but I'd highly suggest a H/W RAID Card for RAID-5 (whereas RAID-0 a.k.a. simple striping only needs S/W RAID).

stranger89> Modern HDDs (say those 200Gb+) are easily capable of transfer rates of over 50MB/sec,...

That's not a sustained rate for "random" I/Os. That's for so-called sequential I/Os. Assuming Sage does 64KB writes, you might get somewhat closer to this than the worst-case figures listed for your chosen drives, however.

Me, I think your real problem will be the drive channel(s) which you didn't explain. I might understand the 6 S-ATA drives as you can probably get a pretty good multi-channel S-ATA controller card. Don't know about your P-ATA performance to those 4 Ultra133 drives.

Why am I concerned about this? Until S-ATA 2 (or SAS or Parallel SCSI or FibreChannel or iSCSI etc...), I/Os begun on a channel hog the channel until completed (see terms like "SCSI Disconnect"). You are going to need to either have a separate channel for each drive (S-ATA kinda solves that one) or use a drive connect which supports multiple outstanding I/Os active in order to achieve the high thru-put you desire.

[stanger89]

Yeah, I know that's sequential, but it's not fully random either, 24MB/sec doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility.

As for channels, that's one of the great things about the 3ware cards, each drive has it's own channel.

[ToxMox]

I would also recommend a better power supply since I don't think 450w is enough to power the 10 drives.

Although I would think a RAID 5 solution would be the best and maybe some day Frey will enable choosing directories for each tuner to record to. I think many of us would like this feature.

[jptaz]

I agree on the power supply I have a 550w in my system with 7 hard drives and 3 PVR 250 cards. Also some one on the forums has 8 encoders running with out a problem. I don't remember if they have them all on the same box or not, but I know someone has 5 in one computer without a problem. A motherboard with onboard raid would help, especially if the raid controller controller is not on the PCI bus, but rather tied directly to the system bus that way on the PCI bus traffic is PVR 250 traffic and file I/O is on the system bus only.

[fidget]

Originally posted by jptaz
I agree on the power supply I have a 550w in my system with 7 hard drives and 3 PVR 250 cards. Also some one on the forums has 8 encoders running with out a problem. I don't remember if they have them all on the same box or not, but I know someone has 5 in one computer without a problem. A motherboard with onboard raid would help, especially if the raid controller controller is not on the PCI bus, but rather tied directly to the system bus that way on the PCI bus traffic is PVR 250 traffic and file I/O is on the system bus only.

If my memory is correct, the eight tuner system had four PCI based and four USB 2.0 based tuners. The load on the power supply wouldn't be nearly as great as if they were all internal.

[SHS]

First of all you not going be able get a backplane with more then 20 slot and 18 is MAX PCI slot you can have and you need Single Processor Single Board or Dual Processor Single Board or 2nd option would be a PCI Expansion Systems but keep in mind that where made for U Racks setup.
If I'am rigth the most you be able to get is up to 8 PCI tuner at MAX bit of 12MBit/sec wirte only to harddrive.
Keep in mind that the PCI bus run at 127MBit/sec and reg IDE UDMA133 harddisk but IDE RAID on other hand may help becuase of the way it wirte data.

[stanger89]

Actually the PCI bus is 32bit 33MHz so thats 1056000000 bits/sec or 126MBytes/sec.

[SHS]

Nope stanger89 it really 32/8*33.3*1,000,000/1,048,576=127.2 MBytes/second

[stanger89]

Oops, forgot the .3, I was correcting that you said it was Bits/sec when it's Bytes/sec.

[sixdoubleo]

Originally posted by medialivingroom
I would like to know if this is possible?

Can I have 24 tuners going at the same time?

I am assuming you are building such a thing for a large dorm or apartment complex with many tennants....if you and your family would actually benefit from 24 tuners, I'd say it'd be time to go get some hobbies, and some exercise! Too much TV!!!

Anyway, if you truly need 24 tuners, I would build 6 4-tuner systems. This way there are no bottlenecks, no device contention, IRQ or any issues. Get a super dirt cheap motherboard and CPU combo like one of the ECS boards with XP2100+ for like $69.99. Run cheap PC-2700 RAM. I bet with slower, run-of-the-mill compoennts you could build a nice little farm of 6 servers very cheap.

Also consider the signal loss of 24 coax splits.