SageTV and RAID Spin-Down / staggered Spin-up

[dcardellini]

Considering an upgrade of my 3ware RAID card to an ARECA card that supports drive spin-down. This RAID card sits in my SageTV Server.

My Sage server has seven tuners (4 OTA USB and 3 Firewire), and records to a separate drive (SATA motherboard). At 3:00am daily, I batch move all new recordings to the RAID array.

90% of time, we are watching shows in evening that are in-process or recently recorded on this separate drive.....essentially a 12-24 drive RAID array goes without access for 95% of the day....lots of wasted power.

I would like to save power by buying a RAID card that supports Spin-Down (Areca), and have the following questions:

1) How often does SageTV check the "recording" drives for new recordings.......i.e. will SageTV keep hitting this array, forcing it on all the time?

2) If we choose to watch a show that is on the "sleeping" RAID array from a Client PC or HD100, and the RAID array has a staggered spin-up (which can take seconds), will the Client or HD100 hang up or give up?

[jerryt]

I am running a Areca ARC-1230 with the drives set to spin down after fifteen minutes.

First access of the array has a few seconds delay, everything after that (within fifteen minutes) is normal. Neither my client or HD 100 have any trouble with accessing the array.

I don't know how often Sage checks the recording directory, but when ever I check the temperature of the drives in my array, it indicates that the drives are not being used (cold).

[heffe2001]

My situation is a bit different (I'm using a UnRaid box), and I'm set to spin down after 30 minutes. The system take a bit to spin up the drives, but once they are up no problems. The HD Extender, nor the MVP's have any issues with the delay (other than just sitting there). The only thing I've seen a few times (but it may be something else causing it), is some errors in recordings that are being done when Sage has to wait on the unraid server to come up..

[dcardellini]

Thanks for great input here. Looks like this will be a winner for me. As I mentioned, all recordings are made on a separate single 64k block drive, so no worries about errors when starting a recording before the array spins up.

Are you running your Areca on XP or Vista?

[jerryt]

Originally Posted by dcardellini

Are you running your Areca on XP or Vista?

Vista Ultimate. Sage records directly to the 12 drive array. The array is running raids 6. It has had two drives fail at the same time and still not lost any recordings, just starts beeping like crazy.

Be sure to buy the NS version of Seagates drives.

[dcardellini]

Want to populate the new arrray with 1.5 TB Seagates (they are AS drives). Some folks over at AVSForum are successful with these drives and the 12xx RAID cards from ARECA. I originally wanted the newer ARECA 1680ix, but now understand that there is little hope for the Seagate SATA's to work with this newer SAS model.

Anything in particular I should be aware of with the "AS" Seagates??

Real scary that you had two drives fail within a (short?) time period....that is statistically way out there, no? All the more reason to dump my RAID 5 and get on the RAID 6 horse ASAP.

My current 3Ware 9500s-12 took five days to expand from 11 to 12 drives (750gb). Any idea on how long this would take on the ARECA 12xx?

Thanks in advance for your help here. Any special tweaks, idiosyncracies, etc. I should be aware of with ARECA and Vista 32 and GPT?

[jerryt]

The AS drives fail. I had 6 AS and 6 NS. Areca product support told me to only use NS drives. 3 of the AS drives have failed in the first year.

I would build a new array today with the ST31000340NS drives.

[dcardellini]

arhhh.....so close to my solution, then....

I guess this is the huge value in these forums...

thx for saving me a lot of pain. Now can I hold out for a better > 1TB drive solution?