HD200 record live tv directly to thumb drive?

[bigo93bronco]

Is it possible to record live tv directly to a thumb drive on the front or back of the HD200 instead of back to the server?

[m1abrams]

Originally Posted by bigo93bronco

Is it possible to record live tv directly to a thumb drive on the front or back of the HD200 instead of back to the server?

That would require that the HD200 has both some type of capture card which it does not and video input connections which it also does not have. Or are you asking is it possible to have the server send the data from the server to the HD200 to its usb attached storage? If the later is the case I noticed that the HD200 can be setup to share the attached storage device so it should be possible to have the server copy files to it. Course you would need to provide the logic to make the server do the copy. Would not be that hard to do but for what purpose?

[bigo93bronco]

Well I thought it might cut down on server usage and network traffic if the tv stream going to the extender could be recorded directly to its own usb drive instead of the server.

[m1abrams]

Originally Posted by bigo93bronco

Well I thought it might cut down on server usage and network traffic if the tv stream going to the extender could be recorded directly to its own usb drive instead of the server.

You understand that the signal that is recorded NEVER goes straight to the HD200. It goes to the server, the server records it and then sends it to the HD200. The HD200 is meant as just a client.

[bigo93bronco]

yeah, I just got ahead of myself and forgot to think about how the system functions. Thanks for the response though.

[bigo93bronco]

I'm concerned about network traffic, as someday I plan on running a total of 6 extenders and 4 clients. I plan to feed 4 HD streams from 4 seperate Dish Network boxes into 4 Hauppage HD PVR's, and have a few ATSC cards to pickup local channels as well, and maybe a couple of FM capable cards for radio service.

[m1abrams]

Originally Posted by bigo93bronco

I'm concerned about network traffic, as someday I plan on running a total of 6 extenders and 4 clients. I plan to feed 4 HD streams from 4 seperate Dish Network boxes into 4 Hauppage HD PVR's, and have a few ATSC cards to pickup local channels as well, and maybe a couple of FM capable cards for radio service.

Only issue you may have is the 6 extenders to the one server. The server will need a Gigabit NIC connected to a Gigabit switch, but short of that it really would not be an issue. Each extender being feed HD content of say ~15Mbps times 6 will be just over the threshold of 100Mb accounting for overhead.

Your bigger concern should be your drives, if by few ATSC cards that means 2, then recording 6 shows at once while watching 4 at once may be a bit much for a single drive. Not so much the throughput but the seek time since it will be trying to read and write to 10 large files at one time. That can be a whole heck of a lot of seeking for a single drive.

[bigo93bronco]

Yeah I definatly be using Gb ethernet, maybe dual Gb. As for the drives, I figured I'd use a single raptor or small SSD for the OS, and I'm constucting a 7TB 8 drive RAID5 array with a quality RAID5 card for all my digital collection (about 5TB right now) and for all clients and extenders to record back to.

[m1abrams]

Originally Posted by bigo93bronco

Yeah I definatly be using Gb ethernet, maybe dual Gb. As for the drives, I figured I'd use a single raptor or small SSD for the OS, and I'm constucting a 7TB 8 drive RAID5 array with a quality RAID5 card for all my digital collection (about 5TB right now) and for all clients and extenders to record back to.

With that setup you should be just fine. If you do not need 7TB but can get by with 4TB a RAID10 will yield you better performance and data protection than RAID5. Basically you would have 4 RAID1 arrays striped in RAID0. So in order to loose the entire array you would have to suffer a multi-drive failure within the same 2 drive RAID1 array which is much less likely than a multiple drive failure within an 8 drive RAID5. Also rebuild time for RAID10 is orders of magnitude faster than RAID5.

Performance is also better due to the fact that mirroring data is much simpler task than calculating parity. Course with a decent RAID card you do minimize this penalty but it is still slower.

[valnar]

Originally Posted by bigo93bronco

Yeah I definatly be using Gb ethernet, maybe dual Gb. As for the drives, I figured I'd use a single raptor or small SSD for the OS, and I'm constucting a 7TB 8 drive RAID5 array with a quality RAID5 card for all my digital collection (about 5TB right now) and for all clients and extenders to record back to.

You probably already know this, but most RAID cards (@ RAID 5) excel at read speeds, but may not at write speeds. Make sure you do indeed buy a quality RAID card.

[bigo93bronco]

well raid5 write times scale pretty good when you add more drives, unlike raid0. I doubt the tuners will ever be all used at the same time, but it makes sense to plan for it within a reasonable budget.

[m1abrams]

Originally Posted by bigo93bronco

well raid5 write times scale pretty good when you add more drives, unlike raid0. I doubt the tuners will ever be all used at the same time, but it makes sense to plan for it within a reasonable budget.

Not sure where you heard that but that statment about raid5 writes scaling better with more drives than raid0 is not true at all.

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by m1abrams

Would not be that hard to do but for what purpose?

To copy a file (any file... song, show, picture, etc) from the server to a thumb drive without having to walk to the server or another computer in the house...