Requirements for SageTV + HDHomerun + PVR-150 - Recording only

[David81]

Good day to you all.

It looks like I'll finally be pulling myself into the HD recording era and hopefully picking up an HDHomerun very soon.

Currently we just have the PVR-150 set up in a server that stores all of our media hidden away in a closet. This season has brought us too many recording conflicts to deal with and it seems logical to go with an HD tuner instead of another SD. I just want to make sure that the server box will be able to handle the recording of 2 HD + 1 SD stream at the same time if need be. The server does no playback, but does run showanalyzer for stripping out commercials. All playback is done on networked PCs or XBOXs.

The specs currently are:

AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice 2.0GHz
1 GB RAM
A multitude of HDDs for media storage
Gig-E Ethernet
WinXP Pro
SageTV

There is not much room for a processor upgrade as the mobo is a socket 754.

Anyone else out there using a lower power system as a recording only server?

Thanks in advance,

David

[matt91]

I did have a lower server until last year. I think is was an Athlon 2200 or something. I was doing just what you intend to do - 2x PVR-150, 1xHDHR. No playback; all streaming to extenders.

It worked fine for me, except that I would occasionally get a bottleneck with the commercial skip. I could never get the CPU throttle to work, so I ended up having to scan the shows starting at ~ 1am each day. (That wasn't a big deal to us, as we're *always* days behind in our viewing.)

So, I'd say go for it. Again, the comskip might be an item that you turn-off (and then tweak later) if you have issues, but I'm going to guess you wont.

Good luck.
Matt


PS: Do you have PATA (IDE) drives? You might see an improvement with a PCI SATA card and some new drives. Just thinking outloud - I certainly wouldn't change them unless you really wanted to.

[David81]

Originally Posted by matt91

PS: Do you have PATA (IDE) drives? You might see an improvement with a PCI SATA card and some new drives. Just thinking outloud - I certainly wouldn't change them unless you really wanted to.

Matt,

Thanks much for the response. I'm actually redoing my storage solution as well and doing away with all PATA drives except for the system drive. As soon as I can get my DVD collection converted to h.264 I'll be freeing up a good bit of room and reorganizing everything.

Sounds like an HDHomerun is in my not-so-distant future.