1 Hard drive per tuner

[Deacon Crusher]

Been reading some threads and I've got a question.

Is it really true that if you have 1 hard drive per tuner (so with my Homerun and pvr550 that's 4 tuners so should have 4 hard drives) then if you are actually recording 4 shows at once then Sage itself would somehow make sure that you are recording one to each of your 4 destination hard drives?

Also, is there a way if you have multiple destinations to get sage to favor one over the others (like you can do with a tuner?) So, if it's only recording one show at a time it should always use X destination until that destination is full.

thanks

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by Deacon Crusher

Is it really true that if you have 1 hard drive per tuner (so with my Homerun and pvr550 that's 4 tuners so should have 4 hard drives) then if you are actually recording 4 shows at once then Sage itself would somehow make sure that you are recording one to each of your 4 destination hard drives?

No, and...

Also, is there a way if you have multiple destinations to get sage to favor one over the others (like you can do with a tuner?) So, if it's only recording one show at a time it should always use X destination until that destination is full.

No.

Appendix C of the PDF manual describes how SageTV decides where to store the next recording; essentially, a new recording goes to the drive with the most available space.


There is a property that can be used to specify which recording dir(s) a tuner can use, but I'm not sure that is what you are looking for.

mmc/encoders/<some number>/forced_video_storage_path_prefix

- Andy

[Deacon Crusher]

Very fast clarification.

Thanks

So, the follow up question is fairly obvious.

Given that Sage will just keep recording to the drive with the most available space it really probably does make sense then to put your drives in a raid array, yes???

thanks

[blade]

Originally Posted by Deacon Crusher

Given that Sage will just keep recording to the drive with the most available space it really probably does make sense then to put your drives in a raid array, yes???

Not really. Raid is talked about enough on the forums that some people seem to think it's needed, but it's not.

I have 2 HD tuners and 2 analog tuners. I regularly capture 4 shows at once and process all 4 with comskip as they record and stream to 2 clients and have never had problems with disk throughput nor do defrag. I recently added my 5th drive. Of course it has the most free space so everything that gets recorded is going to the new drive and I haven't had any problems.

Personally I don't think raid is as beneficial for Sage as some people think. They get caught up in the idea of comparing the performance of a raid array to a single drive when in reality Sage is often accessing multiple drives at once. There are times when all the activity may be hitting a single drive, but probably more often multiple drives will be in use.

[dmiraclejr]

I've got my own thread going on in the hardware forum concerning my problems with multiple, concurrent turners/live comskip/extenders here http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=30330.

I would really like to get to the place where Blade is currently. It used to be that the video card playback was my main trouble spot but the HD extender has greatly reduced those problems. Now I am concentrating on the multiple concurrent tuners/comskip/extenders.

I just can't figure out how some people can have 4 tuners recording to 1 drive with 4 instances of comskip and watching multiple extenders and not have a problem with those concurent recordings themselves and/or the extenders. I admit I am jealous.

I hope I am not derailing this thread (it seems to pertain to me). Any replies or guidance here or in the above linked thread would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[bbig119]

Originally Posted by Opus4

No, and...

No.

Appendix C of the PDF manual describes how SageTV decides where to store the next recording; essentially, a new recording goes to the drive with the most available space.


There is a property that can be used to specify which recording dir(s) a tuner can use, but I'm not sure that is what you are looking for.

mmc/encoders/<some number>/forced_video_storage_path_prefix

- Andy

Andy,

I have a somewhat related question which I assume the answer is no, but please, enlighten me. I currently have all recordings stored over two local drives on my server system. There have been times that I've run into space crunches and felt the need to delete some shows that I really wanted to keep. Is there a way to label a network drive for archived shows(like overflow)? By this I mean that I don't want Sage to actively record to the network drive(for several obvious reasons), but it would be fine to move older recordings to this network drive to free up recording space locally. In this scenario, the recordings would still be browsable as Sage recordings(assuming access to the network drive), but would free up local space which is better for recording shows.

[GKusnick]

Sage won't move files automatically to make room, if that's what you're asking. But if you manually move recording files to a video import directory, they'll still be recognized as recordings rather than imports. See the FAQ for details on how to move recordings safely.