I've been sitting on my hands for a year or so on r5a16 waiting to upgrade but putting it off due to the amount of tweaks i had to do and the worry that the upgrade would not work.

Our household has become fairly dependent on mythtv so I'd be prepared to spent money to minimize the risk...

Question 1:

One thought I had was :

1) Clone the entire existing (120Gb) HD drive onto a new (larger 250Gb) drive
2) remove the existing drive and keep as a backup

3) attempt an upgrade on the new drive - if it does not work I can always switch back to the old drive or try a fresh install on the new drive.


Does this sound feasible - what software would you recommend to do step 1 ?

Question 2:

I'd also considered replacing one of my two wintv nova -T cards with a dual tuner MCE500 card - does this card work ok with the latest version ok knoppmyth ?


Question 3:
Is running 3 DVB tuners gonna get close to the bandwith of the IDE drive
esp if im recording 3 channels and watching something already recorded

My setup is an athlon 1.4gz (vanilla not XP) and 512mb ram

I'm going to answer these out of order.

- First compute the per recording bandwidth in bytes/second by taking the size of a file and dividing it by the number of minutes * 60. Here is an example (a 122 minute recording of "Finding Nemo".)

- Next measure the HD performance using hdparm

Even if you half that ~65Mb/s rate and figure 32Mb/s, you should still see about a 20x ratio. In other words, plenty of spare bandwidth

As for how to upgrade... You've already got all the tools you need. Check out the R5C7 upgrade hints thread here: http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10116 and the posting about the new backup and restore here: http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10117. They include detailed discussions of how to do exactly what you're asking.