A comment on CPU usage...

[hufnagel]

System description:
EPoX 8K9A3+ mainboard
AMD Athlon XP 2000+
512MB PC2700
3ware 7810 RAID controller
(8) WD 120GB drives in a RAID5 set (on the 3ware)
(2) Happauge PVR-250 v16 boards recording at DVD Standard quality
bunch of other drives and IDE controllers as used for recent repair work on this box

Over the past month I've been doing massive work on this box to get the RAID5 setup installed on it. From failing drives to broken RAID0 stripes I've been fixing it all. Throughout that time the machine has been recording programs for me without interruption to various disks on the box. I've had 100% cpu utilization on this machine for in excess of 5 hours at times. I've hit this box so hard at times with local and network traffic the GUI almost stops responding completely for minutes at a time. Not a single encoding problem to date. Even with the Sage target disk(s) being taxed as much as possible moving files around I haven't once had a problem with Sage or the PVR-250 boards. I credit this to two things... having identical revision PVR-250 boards, and the SageTV software being stable. In short, I have virtually no fear of things going wrong when the CPU gets busy.

Oh, the machine does not do anything but record and serve up files (both the shows and my collection of MP3s) to other machines and soon a MediaMVP.

[stanger89]

Cool

[mrseidler]

8 120gb hard drives? Holy cow, that is sweet!