• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Does a "software" RAID 0 (or similar) exist?

S

scottmso

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 15, 2004
Messages
380
Here's the situation:
I have a PVR system with a HDTV and a PVR150 (regular SDTV) card running SageTV. All of the PVR recordings go onto one Maxtor 200GB 7200RPM (regular ATA/133) hard drive. However, when I record on both cards at once, usually the PVR150's recording will be a bit "jumpy."

This makes me think that my hard drive speed is too inadequate to handle both streams recording at once. I have both a 120GB and 100GB Maxtor HD in this system as well. Would there be a way to "stripe" these two drives to improve my speed via software without buying a RAID card? Any advice appreciated - thanks
 
Hmmm
Do you really want to increase the chances of losing your recordings?
Lets not mention performance hit either. On paper it sounds like it would make the problem worse.
 
For this application it's not a performance hit. But my question is, what's the combined bitrate of those two streams? If it's below say 40 MB/s it's not a hard drive problem. Check CPU usage while you do the recording; a 1600+ is pretty weak, and if you're doing the MPEG-2/4 compression in software (the 150 is software-only, right?) that'll put the hurt on quickly.

 
yes, there are several software ways to do raid 0 (or 1 or 0+1).

windows can do it (use dynamic discs)
linux can do it....
cheap raid controllers ($20 ones) do it in software (drivers) aswell.

bottom line is.... IF you do it in software, it is going to be slowet than single drive AND obviously you have reduced reliability, so really dont bother unless you want to get proper hardware raid controller (and these are expensive).

These days (do not confuse with years ago), because data is packed very densly on the hdd, even a single hdd can saturate PCI bus to significant levels. yes, raid-0 setup will give you better benchamrk scores, but not actual performance. max transfer rate per s will be incerased, BUT seek time will incerase aswell, so in many cases you will only loose performance.

IMHO, dont bother, unless you ar eprepared to buy $1K to run multipile discs, and then RAID5 is just better option.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top