Ide Raid ?

[Grey_Goose]

Added a 6th tuner to my system, and am noticing occaisional stuttering on playback. I'm using a client/server configuration, so is it a drive speed issue? Got two single IDE drives (160, 200), should I be considering a hardware-based RAID card?

[Opus4]

What about putting the drives on separate IDE channels, if you haven't done so already & the other IDE channel isn't used for a DVD/CD drive now.

- Andy

[mls]

One also needs to remember that the hard drive and controller speed ratings are usually "burst" speeds.

That is, for an ATA-100 rating, it can reach a max of 100mbs, but in reality it will most likely only be able to support continuous use at about half (or less) of that (usually more like in the mid 40mbs range). With multiple file accesses it could be even far less.

Depending on what recording quailty (speed) setting you are using, you could simply be overloading the drive/controller buss at times depending how many recordings are going on at the same time as playbacks.

Moving the drives to a different line might help somewhat, but would still depend how many things are going to/from the specific drive.

A good RAID controller may help (I'm not a big fan of RAID myself though). However, that could push the bottle neck further up to what the PCI buss itself can handle.

Also, since you appear to be using a combination of local and network feeds, the overhead (although maybe small) of the networking processes could also be causing some interruptions.

When you start trying to have that large amount of continous drive access there are a large number of things to be considered. RAID may be your only hope (assuming the PCI buss and networking doesn't become overloaded).

[chrysek]

I would go with SATA 150 stripe raid, some motherboards do have that option. best if you setup your disks to be exactly the same (for both capacity, cache size and speed RPM). If you wanted the best get Western Digital Raptor HD's, they have 8mb buffer and they are 10K RPM. Very nice drives very competitive to SCSI drives in performance.

I do not know about PC market but for speed in my company we use scsi raid arrays and fiber channel drive arrays where we have multiple disks in those arrays so content is being dumped or read from multiple disks at the same time. With an IDE market I think the fastest you would get if you wanted best performance would be the SATA 150 RAID 0 setup.

I did see some motherboards that they do have RAID build in on them, my abit motherboard had two SATA 150 ports that I could setup raid on them. Other motherboards that I've seen had up to 6 SATA ports, imagine setting up RAID 0 on all of the disks? Should be fast I think.

But then how much information 6 tuners could be writing to? If you recorded at highest quality on all of them at the same time you would be dumping per hour probably 3gig x 6 cards around 18gig of video. That would be around 300mb per minute?!? That would then translate to around 5meg per second of constant writing.

Maybe card as such http://www.xpcgear.com/hira152saco1.html could help, I am not recommending this since I only found this on the internet and I don't know if it is good or not but they are claiming that this card can do 1.5GB/s. Probably there are much better PCI SATA controllers, maybe even try to think about PCI Express card that should deliver even faster performance.

My point in this post is that you can spend all your money investing into hardware and software trying to improve speed but without understanding if disks are the bottleneck it will be not a good idea... Maybe get some benchmark tools and try to see how much data you can write to your disks? See if they are performing well, if you get some acceptable readings.

Hope this helped in any ways although I am not an expert in this field...

Regards,

Chris

PS: go to http://www.storagereview.com if you want to get some more information on drives and controllers and other options that might be worth looking into… Good luck.