I am getting a new BE server setup and am having a difficult time choosing how to configure the storage. I have a 40GB drive that KM is installed on, and I also have 4 160GB drives connected to a SATA card for storage. I am unsure if I should configure the 4 drives using LVM, or just use storage groups.

Any suggestions? Looked through the R5.5 guide, but it didn't really mention anything about storage groups vs LVM.

Choosing depends on how you use your myth box. Storage Groups are great but currently only work for distributing the TV recordings across the Storage Group locations. So if you have lots of videos, music or picture they will only be stored on the /myth mount.

I moved away from LVM once Storage Groups came with .21 because I primarily use my myth box for HDTV recordings. LVM scared me because if 1 drive died I would have lost all the data that was in the LVM. With Storage Groups I would only loose the data that was on that drive.

I have 4 drives of various capacities. My smallest, 80GB, is partitioned 5GB for the OS, 2GB for swap (from the KM Auto Install) and the rest is used as a Storage Group location. My largest drive is 640GB and is my /myth. I have two other drives for Storage Group locations. If the 640GB gets full and I need more space for videos, music, pictures, etc. I just move some of the recordings from /myth/tv to one of the other Storage Group locations.

Britney

I pretty much just use my KM box for recorded TV. I would like to use it to import DVDs an videos but I dont have to right now. Maybe in the future MythTV will support storage groups for those other features also.

I am also going to setting up a OpenFiler file server with software raid5 if I wanted could I point the video/music/pictures folders to nfs/smb shares on that?

I don't know of any reason why you couldn't do that. I have symlinks to SMB mount points in both my video and music folder.

Britney

I started to add my disks to the default storage group.

/myth1/tv
/myth2/tv
/myth3/tv
/myth4/tv

How can I remove the default path?
/myth/tv

I dont want to use that one because its on the OS disk.

Never mind I figured it out. Just hit "D".

MythVideo already explicitly supports multiple directories for videos. This feature predates storage groups; I first noticed it in whatever version of Myth was with R5D1. To use it, go to the setup screen for "directories to store videos" (or whatever) Enter all the paths you need separated by colons.
I have /myth/video:/myth/video2
in my case each one of those is the mount point for another drive. The only boner is that to use MythVideo on another machine ALL the mount points have to match. enjoy!