Is using WHS and two HDHomeruns realistic?

[mevans]

I recently built a WHS (see sig) to use as a file server, and trying to kill two birds with one stone, installed SageTV too.

I have to admit that this is my first WHS, and I am new to SageTV too... but I have built PCs before...

Firstly, SageTV is wonderful and obviously very powerful

However, I am experiencing slow responsiveness/jerky playback (and am doing some investigations - there are other threads on this subject).

I am wondering if I have made the right choices and therefore have a couple of general questions:

1) How realistic is it to use WHS as a file server, and as a SageTV server. i.e. presumably if you are copying files to/from the server, SageTV will soon run into problems. In reality, is this a problem? I’ll notice that I am recording to non-pooled drives to try and minimise this potential problem.

2) When streaming over a network to clients/placeshifter/HD200 is gigabit equipment essential? Especially considering that the HDHomeruns are on the network streaming to the SageTV server, which is then streaming back out again to the clients.
I am considering installing a second network card (that officially has drivers/support for windows server 2003), to have the HDHomeruns on a separate network.

3) It is my understanding that when using the SageTV Client software and the HD200, the processing overhead is minimal on the server. Is this correct? Presumably any up-scaling from SD content to 1080i or 1080p is dealt with in the client/HD200?

4) Considering none of my switches enable me to control QoS. Are there any official bandwidth requirements for HD200s?

Thanks in advance...