I've setup a MythTV (Linux PVR Software) system that I use to watch TV,
watch videos and listen to music.  Since I built the system I've made
DivX copies of all my DVDs and MP3s of all my CDs.  As I get more
movies and CDs I'll add them to this digital collection so my need for
storage will increase.

The MythTV system has an internal 200GB drive for TV recordings and it
accesses a W2K system using NFS for movies and MP3s.  The W2K box
currently has three 120GB IDE drives that are spanned to appear as one
360GB drive to Windows.  This 360GB spanned drive stores all of the
DivX and MP3 files that are played by the MythTV box over the network.

I have two issues:

1.  I need a way to be able to increase the amount of storage in this
W2K box without reformating the drives and it needs to appear as one
drive to Windows. (If there's a better Linux solution to this I don't
mind switching.)

2.  I need a way to backup this large amount of data. (I'll probably
build two of whatever the solution is for issue number 1 and back up
the data over the network every night.)

Using IDE drives (not SCSI and preferably not Serial-ATA), is there a
way to allow for increasing the storage in the system without
formatting the existing drives and still having the total amount of
storage appear as one drive?

Thank you for any suggestions you may have.

Brian

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

bdonaldson@hotmail.com wrote:
> 1.  I need a way to be able to increase the amount of storage in this
> W2K box without reformating the drives and it needs to appear as one
> drive to Windows. (If there's a better Linux solution to this I don't
> mind switching.)

For Linux, LVM and any FS that allows growfs (eg. reiserfs, or even ext3 if 
you don't mind taking it offline).

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Do you mind me asking. How has the picture/sound quality? I've been
considering this sort of project using MythTV for a while.

Thanks in advance.
Brian.
<bdonaldson@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1108849559.153245.138020@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> I've setup a MythTV (Linux PVR Software) system that I use to watch TV,
> watch videos and listen to music.  Since I built the system I've made
> DivX copies of all my DVDs and MP3s of all my CDs.  As I get more
> movies and CDs I'll add them to this digital collection so my need for
> storage will increase.
>
> The MythTV system has an internal 200GB drive for TV recordings and it
> accesses a W2K system using NFS for movies and MP3s.  The W2K box
> currently has three 120GB IDE drives that are spanned to appear as one
> 360GB drive to Windows.  This 360GB spanned drive stores all of the
> DivX and MP3 files that are played by the MythTV box over the network.
>
> I have two issues:
>
> 1.  I need a way to be able to increase the amount of storage in this
> W2K box without reformating the drives and it needs to appear as one
> drive to Windows. (If there's a better Linux solution to this I don't
> mind switching.)
>
> 2.  I need a way to backup this large amount of data. (I'll probably
> build two of whatever the solution is for issue number 1 and back up
> the data over the network every night.)
>
> Using IDE drives (not SCSI and preferably not Serial-ATA), is there a
> way to allow for increasing the storage in the system without
> formatting the existing drives and still having the total amount of
> storage appear as one drive?
>
> Thank you for any suggestions you may have.
>
> Brian
>

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

oracle wrote:
> Do you mind me asking. How has the picture/sound quality? I've been
> considering this sort of project using MythTV for a while.
>
> Thanks in advance.
> Brian.

The Picture and Sound quality of the DivX files depends on how they're
encoded.  I'm not an audiophile by any means, but these are the sizes I
go with to maintain the DVD sound and video quality.  This also
includes the AC3 encoding so it'll play Dolby Digital 5.1 through my
receiver.  On average a visually complex movie like Star Wars Episode 1
or Lord of the Rings will be about 2GBs in size.  I usually make less
visually complex movies (e.g. Something about Mary, Austin Powers)
about 1.5GBs.  Older movies (e.g. Airplane!, Three Amigos) can be as
little as 1GB or less since they're kinda grainy to begin with.  Check
out http://www.doom9.org for more info on this stuff.

As far as the quality of TV Recordings by MythTV I use a PVR-250 TV
Tuner, which has a hardware MPEG encoder.  With this setup the TV
recordings look just like live TV to me.

As for my backup system I ended up building two identical Windows
machines.  I installed the OSes on a couple small drives I had laying
around.  Then I put 500GBs worth of additional storage in each of them.
One of them will be the main file server.  The other will contain a
nightly backup of the first one.  Big hard drives are so cheap these
days with all the rebates that companies like CompUSA and Officemax
have.  I bought a 250GB drive for $90 the other day.  I had to make
sure to get some big (600W) power supplies so I would have enough molex
power connectors for all the hard drives.  I also purchased a couple
cheap ($15) Syba IDE controllers to allow for the extra drives.  Rather
than using RAID I just created a spanned drive in Windows.  This way I
can add another drive and just extend the spanned drive to it for
additional storage.

The MythTV box is on a switched 100Mbps network and it accesses the
movies and MP3s on the Windows server via NFS.  I used to use SAMBA,
but it has problems with files over 2GB.  There's no lag or anything
playing the big files over the network.  I haven't done this yet, but I
want to put a gigabit PCI card in each of the new file servers and
connect them with a cross-over cable to make backups faster.

I know the same thing could've been accomplished using Linux and LVM
(on cheaper hardware even), but I'm not a Linux guru so it was easier
(i.e. faster for me) to use Windows.  Thanks to everyone for the
suggestions.

Brian


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> <bdonaldson@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:1108849559.153245.138020@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com... 
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