WHS, SageTV 7, recording to pool?, 64K clusters?, duplication?, drive balancer?

[mevans]

Hi all,

trying not to drag up old issues, but after a bit of searching i couldn't find answers to the current 'best practice' WHS / SageTV setup.

my reason for asking: i am doing a bit of shuffling of hdd's - trying to reduce the number of hdd's in my WHS by swapping some small drives to 2TB drives, along with increasing the size of my sagetv recording drives; and it got me thinking that with version 7 of SageTV, you shouldn't have to use 64k clusters (which was one of the reasons why i have been recording to 2 hdd's that are not in the pool).

so, i'm seriously considering switching to recording to the storage pool (NOT 64k clusters), with folder duplication turned OFF for the recording share, and using drive balancer to help balance the files across the physical hdd's in the storage pool.

and advice??

thanks in advance

mevans

[stevech]

I don't know if this helps, but I simply have a pair if disks in RAID1 via the BIOS and Windows XP (not WHS) doesn't know/care. A few valued videos are manually copied to secondary disks.

[voorhees]

I have been using WHS for almost 2.5 years now and I really like it. I have 5 HDs, each the same (1.5TB Seagate) and the drive extender keeps the drives ballanced really well. If I add a bunch of data that was not recorded by SageTV, WHS puts it all on one disk and then tries to evenly fill the other disks until it is balanced. Or, I use Drive Balancer to even them out and then SageTV will just record to the least filled drive. I did have a different drive in the pool at one time (removed since it started to fail), but for some reason WHS would not keep it balanced as it did the drives that were the same. I have SageTV record to a non-duplicated share. Also, even though it looks like SageTV does not require it any more I do have all of my pooled drives formatted to 64k clusters. When I added my last two drives I probably could have gone without formatting then with 64k clusters, but felt it was the right thing to do to keep them the same as the other three and went ahead and formated them with 64k clusters. Hope this helps.

[Beefcake550]

You can have drives in the pool be 64k cluster size. Not that you would need to, but I do it anyway....less overhead.

Other than that, you have a great plan.

[mevans]

thanks for all your advice.

what do you mean by:

but I do it anyway....less overhead

i was under the impression that smaller files (i.e. less than 64k) would take up more space on the drives with a 64k cluster size. Maybe, though, the reality is that not very many files are less than 64k.

there are instructions somewhere here on how to check what the cluster size is on a drive - i have a feeling that some of my pool is currently 64k. It may not be a good idea to mix cluster sizes across the drives in the pool.

cheers

[DIBU]

need Sage7 64k ??

..i think under v7 is this not needed.

i migrate now from w7 server to WHS1 and i have no problems. sage are recording to a non duplicatet standard share "tv-recordings"

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by mevans

thanks for all your advice.
what do you mean by:

i was under the impression that smaller files (i.e. less than 64k) would take up more space on the drives with a 64k cluster size. Maybe, though, the reality is that not very many files are less than 64k.

I think he was talking about OS overhead, not file space overhead. When you have a 6GB file, the OS has a easier time controlling it when it's divided into big pieces, instead of little ones. (94K blocks vs. 1.5M blocks)

With 64K blocks, all files use multipules of 64K of disk space. So a zero byte files uses 64K, a 65K uses 128K, but when 99% of your files are 3GB+, it doesn't really matter. All my "data storage" disk are now formatted with 64K blocks, even if mixed with small files!

[stevech]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

All my "data storage" disk are now formatted with 64K blocks, even if mixed with small files!

I'd add: my partition for Sage video files is formatted at 64K blocks. The boot partition is the default smaller block size, for efficiency in non-video files. In my system, a pair of disks in RAID1 have a C: boot partition and a V: partition for videos.

It's my understanding that using 64K reduces the number of I/O's per second in the OS = less overhead and CPU time. Probably not a huge issue, but intuition is that 64KB hunks from a 2GB file makes sense.

[mevans]

Thanks for all of the replies.

It looks like the 64K cluster size is an advantage for storage (i.e. non system) drives generally.

So I'm in the process of converting my storage pool drives to 64k clusters! three down, one to go....

Thanks again