I like my hard drives to last as long as possible and run with as little heat as possible too. Cost really isnt a big deal but it doesnt hurt either when the 5400s are usually cheaper.

I'm am leaning towards getting 5400 rpm and would like to know...

Is there a big performance gap between how KnoppMyth will run on a 5400 vs a 7200? If so what portions will be affected the most. (ie will it make the Channel guide menu pull up slower?)

(Not including KnoppMyth install time of course. Which obviously will take a little bit longer)

Thanks in advance,
KC

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KnoppMyth R5A30.2
MSI Motherboard
Intel Celeron D 310 2.13 GHZ 533 FSB
GeForce-t64 DDR MX4000 AGP 8x w/ TV-Out
250GB 7200 HDD
2x256 MB DDR Ram
Hauppauge PVR 150 (1045)
IR BLASTER (Now Working)

When selecting a harddisk you shouldn't just focus on RPMs. Any recent drive should be fast enough to be used with Mythtv. You might gain more in MySQL or filesystem tuning.
Personally I have good experiences with Seagate. Especially the two platter drives (e.g. the 160GB 7200.7) don't run hot at all, are modest in power consumption plus they're quiet too.
I find this site very useful to aide in harddisk selection:

http://www.storagereview.com

It's performance database lists idle noise and power dissipation (indication of heat dissipation) which are things I select my disks on. They also give you lots of performance benchmarks.

I think willem has the right approach. I don't care if the drive is 5400 or 7200 rpm. I want one that is reliable and quiet. To that end, I like the standard 5 year guarantee Seagate provides. MythTv is not going to seriously tax the ability of your disks. Even high-def recording is pretty low stress for a modern-day hard disk.

I have discovered one sure-fire way to enhance disk reliability, though. ADEQUATE COOLING!! It's important to get the heat away from the drive. Every disk failure I've had was preceeded by a high-heat stress event. It sets the stage for failure sometimes days or weeks in the future.

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Nice advise gents....should I get one of those harddrive cooler. It looks like a long flat heat sync that is placed on top of the hard drive.

_________________
KnoppMyth R5A30.2
MSI Motherboard
Intel Celeron D 310 2.13 GHZ 533 FSB
GeForce-t64 DDR MX4000 AGP 8x w/ TV-Out
250GB 7200 HDD
2x256 MB DDR Ram
Hauppauge PVR 150 (1045)
IR BLASTER (Now Working)

BTW, you can measure your HD temp:

#disk temperature:
smartctl -a /dev/hda | grep Temp
smartctl -a /dev/hdb | grep Temp

Webmin (if you have it installed) will also show the smart drive details, including temperature.

Here's a handy mod for a Mythbackend:

http://www.coolermaster-europe.com/index.php?LT=english&Language_s=2&url_place=product&p_serial=STB-3T4-E1&other_title=+STB-3T4-E1+4-in-3%20Device%20Module

It allows you to fit four harddisks and the 12cm fan makes sure there is adequate cooling of the disks. Highly recommended. I haven't seen my disks go over 34 degrees C with it.

15K SCSI someone missed that option the poll..

Just because my boot drive pretty much *HAS* to be ide, doesn't mean my /cache and /myth filesystems have to be.. LOL

With old (late 90's) servers goin cheap.. you can't beat the price / performance of some old rack mount jobs complete with serverworks chipsets, dual or quad p3 / Xeon chips, 64bit PCI bus and ram heavy raid controllers driving 15Krpm 18 & 36GB drives.. makes a great backend.. and you *NEVER* have to worry about bus bandwidth, slow drives etc..

no more worrying about tuning up the drive with hdparm etc etc..

besides.. with all the drives and tuners in the backend.. makes for a quieter front end, and less cabling to boot.

Holy Schnikes WeedKing...now thats a great idear. Dont know y i haven't thought of it. So you have a rackmount box?

_________________
KnoppMyth R5A30.2
MSI Motherboard
Intel Celeron D 310 2.13 GHZ 533 FSB
GeForce-t64 DDR MX4000 AGP 8x w/ TV-Out
250GB 7200 HDD
2x256 MB DDR Ram
Hauppauge PVR 150 (1045)
IR BLASTER (Now Working)

http://cgi.ebay.com/IBM-Netfinity-4500r ... dZViewItem

basically that.. except i have a 933 and 1.2GB of ram.. total overkill.. but it adds to the geek factor i guess.

2-64 bit 66mhz pci buses.. 4-32 bit 33mhz busses.. it's loud.. heavy.. full of redundancy and.. it will never die.. LOL.. shove it into a corner in the basement and forget about it.

has 3 swappable drive bays.. one ide channel.. and for $80.. makes a great backend.. if i can't get knoppmyth running on it, i'll do it the hardway with FC4 & mythtv rpm and keep knoppmyth for the front ends. i've had trouble before with ide Hard drives's (albit cheap ones) being able to keep up to recording multiple streams and also streaming uncompressed HD video (.ts files) to the front end.. this should aleviate the issue.. LOL

now i just gonna find one of those terabyte raids that hit the goverment surplus sites for pennies a pound..

if your looking for drives that last forever.. scsi is it..

i figure if i gotta boot off a standard IDE.. big deal.. the /cache is the most important filesystem to be fast.. more so when/if i eventually throw some HD tuners in there. The others not so much.

Well you just opened my mind up to a whole new area. Am familiar with SCSI from back in the day when you saw more of it in desktop computing. Had no idea it was that solid tho. Makes me kinda sad that ide is the standard but oh well. At least we have SATA. I will read more into this WheelKing. Thanks for the advice

_________________
KnoppMyth R5A30.2
MSI Motherboard
Intel Celeron D 310 2.13 GHZ 533 FSB
GeForce-t64 DDR MX4000 AGP 8x w/ TV-Out
250GB 7200 HDD
2x256 MB DDR Ram
Hauppauge PVR 150 (1045)
IR BLASTER (Now Working)

there's an EXP15 loaded with 10 18.2GB drives on the bay for $300..

ultra160 10Krpm drives.. sure they're "old" but they're just as fast if not faster than any sata when properly raided.

i'm partial to big old hardware..

and.. well.. what's old is new again..

for instance old rs/6000 systems used a SSA for their servers (serial storage) way back in the day.. serial connections, scsi drives basically.. today.. it's back envogue.. but it's known as serial scsi. *shrug*

sata is cheap.. but i have a hard time trusting my movie/tv collection to it just yet..

couldn't agree more re: the SCSI issue. I'm just getting into configuring my computer hardware in my home LAN as all SCSI (almost). my firewall is an ancient Compaq dual 200MHz 2U rackmount server (ebay, 15 clams, SCSI HD, very weird box...but built like a tank). My Myth backend will be a dual 1GHz PIII 4U rackmount server (ebay, $25) with SCSI HD. very cool, built like a tank!
My experimental frontend (I mostly use Macs a frontends but they're too underpowered to do HD) is a dual Xeon 2.4MHz box, unfinished as of yet. Another ebay find, very fast, very solid. Overclockable to 3.2MHz from what I've read. Schwiiing!

-B