Performance thoughts...

[audiohead]

See my signature that I have a GIG of ram in my machine

One thing that's come to mind seeing that the htpc based on Sage in that it's recording all the time is can I put up a RAM drive (and what size ram drive would you recommend 512M? 768M?) How much ram do I need with a pair of TV cards, running SageTV fulltime (it's how my TiVo's run to a greater or lessor degree). I'm disabled and I have the TV on fulltime and have the TV on 24/7, perhaps I can time the drives out if it's not recording to the HD's and if so how soon can I time them out? I was thinking 5 minutes so the drives would spin down when not recording a show but will spin up when it about to record a show or should I be out smoking something? Well, I'll be looking forward to any ideas that people have, thank you very much.

"Elvis has left the building..."

[xlr8shun]

you want to record shows to the ramdrive?

dont bother, 1gig might be a lot of ram, but its nothing compared to mpeg2 capture. now, if you had 80gig of ram you might be onto something..

if you just want to run sage off the ramdrive, well then i guess you'd need ~30meg, but i dont see where that'd make any difference.

[Karen0302]

audiohead,

What are you trying to accomplish?

[carlgar]

I think audiohead wants to allow the hard disk to power down.

audiohead, you may want to review the thread SageTV prevents Hard Disk Power down .

[Karen0302]

I belong to the school of thought that says that the most wear and tear on a hard drive occurs during power up. So all of my drives are set to never power themselves down.

In my experience the thing which has the worst long term effect on a hard drive is heat. All of my drives have very quiet cooling fans to insure a resonable air flow to keep them cool.

Karen

[Frunobulax]

Originally posted by Karen0302
I belong to the school of thought that says that the most wear and tear on a hard drive occurs during power up. So all of my drives are set to never power themselves down.

In my experience the thing which has the worst long term effect on a hard drive is heat. All of my drives have very quiet cooling fans to insure a resonable air flow to keep them cool.

Karen

I belong to that same school of thought. However, I also attend the night school that says that fans can never be too loud!

[audiohead]

no folks, the idea was that the scrioll forward and back for when you need to skip a commercial from a show that you are behind in it would go faster offf the HD's. I'm not worried about the drives getting used all the time, I have 2 TiVos and both of those record nearly 20 hours a day and I haven't failed one yet. I've upgraded to 2G on one machine and I'm just thinking that running things either without a swap file or out of RAM drives might speed things up and making things act smoother.

[stanger89]

You'd need a 3-4Gb RAM drive if you wanted to store 1 show, 64MB would probably be plenty if you just wanted to run Sage (the program, not any recordings) out of ram.

[byopvr]

Originally posted by audiohead
no folks, the idea was that the scrioll forward and back for when you need to skip a commercial from a show that you are behind in it would go faster offf the HD's. I'm not worried about the drives getting used all the time, I have 2 TiVos and both of those record nearly 20 hours a day and I haven't failed one yet. I've upgraded to 2G on one machine and I'm just thinking that running things either without a swap file or out of RAM drives might speed things up and making things act smoother.

eh, *shrug*... I don't think you'll get the benefit you are looking for using huge RAMdrives... at a certain point you'll have to write that data to disk anyways, and god help you if you have a power outage.

I think you'd best be served by having a properly tuned machine/install. Get fast drives with generous cache to begin with. If you are really hardcore (2gigs ram in a PVR?) perhaps you should get a pair of those raptor SATA drives and RAID them (0? I get my RAID stripings mixed up )

You propably should deep six the swap file on the 2gig machine.

I assume you are in XP. Have you done any of the other basic tweaks to make it run better? (like xptweaks guides or blackvipers uneeded services directory (careful with that though) , etc ).

I just looked at your sig system specs... jeebus christmas. I don't think you'll get the benefit you are looking for in a RAMdrive, but you should setup your system accordingly to take advantage of that memory i.e. different buffer settings, larger block size on your drives, NTFS instead of FAT,... Now if there is some sort of adjustable parameter for memory "buffer" (if there's such an animal) in SageTV maybe THEN you could take more advantage, but other than that I got nothing.

rampy