I was thinking of getting a new hard drive. The Hitiachi makes a drive specifically for DVR systems called the CinemaStar. Is there any advantage of getting a CinemaStar with MythTV/KnoppMyth versus just getting a Hitchai Deskstar? TIA

_________________
R5.5 Dragon 2.0 - like
BE:
Case: GD01-MX
MB: Intel DG965WH
CPU: Intel Q6700
Mem: 4GB
HDD: Hitachi 1TB
Tuner: none/PVR-350
GFx: Nvidia XFX 7600 GS
Audio: on board
FE:
Evo 510 SFF w/ Nvida 6200
Remote: ATI Remote Wonder w/ kernel mod fix.

Basically the main difference is cost. The CinemaStar line has a fair price premium over the Deskstars. There are notations that imply that the CinemaStar line might have slightly better error correction and might be slightly quieter.

The differences are so slight that it could easily be the equivalent of individual unit to unit differences. It is probably more marketing gobbledygook than anything else.

There's a fairly good discussion of this over on the Tivo Community forums from last September.

Silent PC Review's current favourite for a quiet drive is the Western Digital Green Power drive. And Storage Review also concurs in their conclusion of the comparrison between Seagate's ES.2 and the Green Power. SR also states that the Deskstars are the highest performance drives, but that really doesn't apply in the context of a PVR.

And of course if you want to let your eyes glaze over, you could listen to Steve Gibson's "Security Now: Episode 81" discussion on drive failure rates. It references the Google's Study on Hard Drive Reliability and the Carnegie Mellon University Disk Failures in the Real World papers.

Thanks for the info. Well, my MBE/FE machine is currently in my living room, but I plan to stick it in a closet when I finish adding a network / coax drop to the closet. So, noise won't be a huge issue for me. I'm more concerned with reliability. I plan to get one drive now, pray that it doesn't fail and get more drives to setup a raid array later when the prices go down a little bit and my finances allow. It’ll be my first time setting up a raid array in Linux, so I’ll have to do a little research before that. What drive would you suggest for a KnoppMyth box?

_________________
R5.5 Dragon 2.0 - like
BE:
Case: GD01-MX
MB: Intel DG965WH
CPU: Intel Q6700
Mem: 4GB
HDD: Hitachi 1TB
Tuner: none/PVR-350
GFx: Nvidia XFX 7600 GS
Audio: on board
FE:
Evo 510 SFF w/ Nvida 6200
Remote: ATI Remote Wonder w/ kernel mod fix.

May be too obvious, but have you looked at the reference platform specs? http://mythic.tv/system_specs.php

Mike

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LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
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