SageTV Recordings and NAS-related questions

[LehighBri]

I recently purchased a Synology DS411+ NAS which is capable of ~110MB/s average read and write speed over my gigabit network. Couple questions:

1. Would you recommend for or against using the NAS as my recording directory (e.g. to store live TV, recorded TV, etc)? I'm not sure how much of that bandwidth is used when recording TV (I have both a HD-PVR and HDHomeRun)

2. If I use a local hard drive for recordings, is there a mechanism (either built into Sage or a plugin) to move the recording to the NAS after the recording is complete (or ideally after a .edl comskip file is generated)?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

[tmiranda]

I used to record directly to a NAS that had lower bandwidth and it worked just fine. You probably want to give it a quick "stress test" to see if it can handle all three streams at once (2 from HDHR, one from HD-PVR).

You can use SJQ (Sage Job Queue) to move the recordings after the .edl files have been created, but it's not necessary if you record straight to the NAS.

The only downside I had with recording to the NAS was that if the router went down the recordings would fail.

[elefante]

I originally had a synology 110j (not as nice as yours), where I backed up the filesystem for the recordings. I used the iscsi target from the synology, so it shows up as a physical drive on you Sage server (say F, and is more efficient than running CIFS. You just need to run iscsi client on your windows sage server. MSFT Client works great.

I just checked my VM, and with 2 HD shows recording (1080i) and a single HDHR (2 tuners), it looks like I am running total in/out at 7.8 MB/s, which if you have GigE would work just fine, even 100Mbit would probably work (I wouldn't bet on that tho). So my 2 HD streams peak at 3.6 MB/sec, which any NAS can handle.

I currently run iscsi through a VM and a single drive (no RAID) and there isn't a hiccup.

If you are unfamiliar w/ iscsi: (don't use CHAP)

http://forum.synology.com/wiki/index...gy_DiskStation

For initiator on Windows:
http://forum.synology.com/wiki/index...dows_Computers

[LehighBri]

Originally Posted by elefante

I originally had a synology 110j (not as nice as yours), where I backed up the filesystem for the recordings. I used the iscsi target from the synology, so it shows up as a physical drive on you Sage server (say F, and is more efficient than running CIFS. You just need to run iscsi client on your windows sage server. MSFT Client works great.

I just checked my VM, and with 2 HD shows recording (1080i) and a single HDHR (2 tuners), it looks like I am running total in/out at 7.8 MB/s, which if you have GigE would work just fine, even 100Mbit would probably work (I wouldn't bet on that tho). So my 2 HD streams peak at 3.6 MB/sec, which any NAS can handle.

I currently run iscsi through a VM and a single drive (no RAID) and there isn't a hiccup.

If you are unfamiliar w/ iscsi: (don't use CHAP)

http://forum.synology.com/wiki/index...gy_DiskStation

For initiator on Windows:
http://forum.synology.com/wiki/index...dows_Computers

Thanks for this... very helpful. Is there any advantage of using iSCSI to have it show up as a drive letter vs. simply using SMB to access the shared folders on my NAS (e.g. \\nas\recordings)? I'm pretty sure sage doesn't need a drive letter to record to.