Recording drive question (calling all hard drive experts!)

[Kirby]

Ok, I am re-doing my Sage server again, and want to get down to one large recording drive to be located on the server to house all recordings while they are made, and until I move them to a storage server on the network. With that said, I am planning on at least a 250GB drive, possibly larger, SATA2, 16MB cache if possible.

I will have 2 R5000 units recording to the drive, plus 1-2 OTA tuners, and possibly 1-2 QAM tuners at some point (yeah I'm dreaming!), but I would expect the maximum total number of High def streams to be recorded at once to be 3, 4 in rare situations. At 19mbit/sec, 4 streams should not cause any issue. Correct? Where my question really comes into play though is with the new perpendicular recording drives. Will these cause issues? More or less fragmentation? Other issues? Right now I'm leaning towards a Seagate 7200.10 320GB SATA2 drive, which seems like a decent drive, but the whole perpendicular recording thing got me wondering if its a smart move or not.

[GKusnick]

Perpendicular recording has to do with how the heads write bits onto the platter. It's purely a magnetic technology thing and has no software impact whatsoever.

[Kirby]

I know, I was asking about fragmentation on such a drive, whether it will be an issue opposed to parallel recording media. In theory I would assume no, but just wanted to verify.

[GKusnick]

Fragmentation is a software thing, a result of the way the OS organizes blocks of data on disk. Whether the individual bits are recorded longitudinally or perpendicularly is handled internally by the drive hardware and is completely invisible to the OS.

To use a crude analogy, longitudinal v. perpendicular recording is like parallel parking v. angled parking. Drive fragmentation is like city zoning rules on where parking lots can be built. The one doesn't affect the other.

[Kirby]

ok. thanks..