Record To External Drive?

[cncb]

I am (tentatively) considering switching my big Windows server to a Mac Mini with an external drive (USB or firewire). I have 2 HDHRs so it would have to support up to 4 simultaneous recordings. Is this feasible with an external drive? Anyone doing this? Thanks.

[onlydarksets]

Are you currently recording 4 tuners to a single drive? My (limited) understanding is that file I/O wouldn't support this in practice, even if it's an internal or eSATA drive.

I did it on Vista with a single HDHR and a 1.5TB USB drive, and it worked OK. Seemed to get a little sluggish if I wanted to playback while recording two shows at once, but, again, that's to be expected due to file I/O limitations.

[cncb]

Originally Posted by onlydarksets

Are you currently recording 4 tuners to a single drive?

Yes, I currently can simultaneously record 4 tuners to the same internal SATA drive with no problems.

[sandor]

you should have no issue at all. i have successfully recorded from 4 HDHR tuners to a external FW400 drive on my macbook.

ATSC is what, roughly 19 mbps --> roughly 2.4 MB/s --> 4 streams = max 9.6 MB/s write per second

as long as there is space on the drive, it shouldn't be an issue. now if you want to start adding in playback, comskip, re-encoding, etc then i would surely think you should get multiple external drives. daisy chaining FW drives really starts to bring out its benefits over USB.

[cncb]

Originally Posted by sandor

as long as there is space on the drive, it shouldn't be an issue. now if you want to start adding in playback, comskip, re-encoding, etc then i would surely think you should get multiple external drives. daisy chaining FW drives really starts to bring out its benefits over USB.

Thanks. So, are you saying that daisy-chained firewire drives are actually better/faster than having separate USB drives?