Will mythtv make use of my 2nd hard drive?

[Afkpuz]

When LMCE detected my 1TB drive, I told it to use it to store stuff on it.  But recently, I got a message that I was running low on disc space.  Apparently, all my TV shows are being recorded on my smaller harddrive which is just about full.  Is this ok?  Will lmce switch over when my first hdd is full?  I tried changing the mythtv settings and told it to save on my other hdd, but it changed back after a little while.  How can I get lmce to only save on my secondary hdd?

[tschak909]

Currently MythTV does not store on anything but the main disk for the moment. This needs to be fixed, and will be fixable with the current MythTV and its storage groups.

-Thom

[Afkpuz]

Thanks Thom

[ldiener]

Afkpuz thanks for asking this question.  I too just added a 1TB drive and it wasn't clear to me how it would be accessed for recording purposes.  LMCE detects it and asks whether I want to use it for storing media automatically, so I said yes.

Related to this issue, and perhaps this is a question for you Thom, there have been some posts recently in the MythTV forums about high levels of HD activity.  One respondant suggested that users should set up their systems so that the disk that contains the system and mysql db is physically separate from the disk used for recording media.  Based on your response to Afkpuz, am I correct in assuming that this is not yet possible in 7.10?

Thanks,

Larry

[tschak909]

Currently due to MythTV's limitations, the tv shows are stored on the main disk alongside system. We will need to merge in MythTV SVN to solve this problem, but we haven't gotten to this, yet.

-Thom

[Afkpuz]

Well, I have some experience with mythtv+ubuntu and digital and it kind of relates.  At one time, I had 2 not high def, but just digital tuner cards and only one hard drive.  I ran into bottleneck problems when I was recording one digital tv show and trying to watch another, recorded or streaming.  Adding a secondary harddrive helped to stop that bottleneck and I was able to record 2 digital tv streams and watch 1 from the 2nd hard drive.  Keep in mind that SD digital TV is at least 1 Gig per half hour and high def will be even higher, so read and write speed will be a big issue for hard drives that will store HD tv and movies.  So, it would definitely be a good idea to have a second hard drive just for media as more and more media goes high def.  That way, all of that hard drive's speed can be devoted to media, as opposed to media+operating system.

[tschak909]

MythTV will be changed to utilize the storage radar in LinuxMCE. Therefore, the disk with the most space will be used to store recordings.

-Thom

[caddywhompus]

When you say "will be" do you mean it's already done?

I have LMCE installed but temporarily out of service because I was waiting for the 0.21 version of MythTV to become available in it.  One of my chief issues was the inability to store recordings on a different drive than the OS.  If this issue is solved, I may put LMCE back in service!