Help with HTPC disk drives

[StreakyboneHead]

Here is my set up:

Asus M4A785-M
Phenom X3 2.4GHz
4GB DDR2 800
500GB IDE Maxtor system
500GB WD5000KS 'downloads' drive
1TB WD10EADS Recording drive
XFX HD4500
HD Homerun
Win7 Pro 64
BeyondTV 4
Boxee
Remote Wonder

I wish to upgrade my system hard drives - the 1TB has 22hrs left. I am not worried about upgrading the system drive as I have the system in a 'sweet spot'

I intend to pick up another HDHomeRun as the current one has been working fine, do a switcheroo with the 1TB green and the nearly full 500Gb download drive and buy a 2TB for my recording drive - I only have 3 bays

Anyway - when BeyondTV kicks in and starts recording Bones and 'Americas Test Kitchen' to my 'green' while I am watching a pre-recorded Big Bang Theory or piping music using Boxee - I know my wee box is straining at the gunwhales (pronounced 'gunnals').


With four tuners each pushing a MPEG transport stream to one HD, with concurrent playback of a recorded show, how would these green drives hold up?

Obviously I would prefer a lower heat, lower noise 2TB drive, but if I have to I will go to a WD Black.

Has anybody got any real life experience with high throughput HTPCs and green drives?

Thanks

 

[rwpritchett]

My HTPC has the following drives:

64GB Kingston SSD (OS+apps)
1TB WD Green (recording drive+SD content)
1TB WD Black (BD content)
2TB Samsung F4 (BD content)

I also have 4 ATSC tuners... scatch that... I took one out to put into the bedroom HTPC so it has 3 now.

Anyways, I'm pretty sure I've used all four tuners at once and I don't remember having any problems with throughput, though I don't recall ever recording 4 programs while watching a 5th recording at the same time.

Here's some food for thought: my 2TB Samsung "green" drive is a 5400 rpm drive, but it benchmarks faster than my 7200rpm WD 1TB black drive. Also, the black drive is NOISY. It constantly hums while the platters are spinning and has audible reads/writes. The Samsung can definitely handle a high simultaneous load. I can't say for sure on the WD Green because it is the slowest of the bunch.

If you like, I could run some tests this weekend on my WD green drive and see how it goes. I could record three programs at once while watching a 4th and note any problems. I really don't want to put that 4th tuner back into my main HTPC to test unless absolutely necessary.

 

[StreakyboneHead]

Thanks - that would be great.

An another note - I'm sure I selected HTPC forum - need to visit an eye doctor, methinks.

 

[rwpritchett]

OK, I've experimented. Here's what I did: set all three tuners to simultaneously record three 1080i programs while I watched a previously recorded 1080i at the same time. All programs were reading/writing from the same hard drive. Here is the result:

As you can see above, I'm only pushing 7MB/s disk I/O with all of this activity. You'll be just fine recording 4 shows at once, even if you are watching a previously recorded 5th TV program. There was no stutter or any other anomaly during playback.

Hope this answers your question.

 

[StreakyboneHead]

Best answer selected by StreakyboneHead.

 

[StreakyboneHead]

Yep - it sure helps.

Big thanks