USB Drive for recorded TV

[Blamey]

I have a spare 500GB 2.5" Drive that I would like to use for recorded TV. I don't want to buy a larger internal drive until the prices are more reasonable. I have a few questions.

- Would there be any issues with using a USB drive for recoded TV or should I take it out and connect it internally.
- Can I use multiple drives\folders for a recorded TV. From the MCE setup it seems you are limited to a single drive.
- If I can use two locations, for better performance should I rather just use the second drive (as the first drive is running the OS.
- Any other storage suggestions.

[STC]

Regardless of how many tuners you have I would advise on fitting the drive internally to a Sata port.
Natively, Media center only records to one location at any given time. You can manually change locations.
It is best practice to keep recordings away from the OS.

[Venom51]

No reason not to connect it and mount it internally. The connectors are the same so take advantage of the extra performance of the SATA directly instead of the slower USB bus.

[richard1980]

- Would there be any issues with using a USB drive for recoded TV or should I take it out and connect it internally.
- Can I use multiple drives\folders for a recorded TV. From the MCE setup it seems you are limited to a single drive.
- If I can use two locations, for better performance should I rather just use the second drive (as the first drive is running the OS.

1. If you can connect internally, I don't know why you'd waste your time or money on an external drive.

2. Yes, but it takes extra software to get it going. Look here.

3. Always keep your recordings on a different physical drive than your OS. In fact, even with a standard PC, you should try to follow the same practice. OS and programs on one drive/partition, personal documents, media, etc on another.

[Blamey]

I have a spare external drive enclosure. Really I was just being lazy. I need to go find the cable for the PSU in my basement (it packed away) to power the new drive and the current cable can't reach the two drives and the CD Drive.

Thanks for the advice, for now I have unplugged the CD drive to power the 2.5" drive. Its all installed and connected. Good to have the extra recording space.


Why do you recommend separating files to a partition. I can see the benefit of having two drive (as both can be reading/writing at the same time effectively doubling the speed). I can't see the benefit of multiple partitions.

[richard1980]

If a hard drive was a house, partitions would be the rooms of a house. Partitions allow you to organize similar types of data into groups, just like rooms of a house allow you organize similar objects into groups. For most people, all of the objects needed to prepare a meal are grouped together in the kitchen. But just imagine if you had a house with just one big room...there's no way to group similar items together without some kind of room structure, so the items necessary to prepare a meal would not be grouped together. They could be scattered all over the place, with unnecessary objects in your way (imagine the toilet being in front of the refrigerator, neither of which is anywhere close to the salt). Obviously this would impact your ability to prepare a meal. By dividing the house into multiple rooms, you can prepare a meal more efficiently if you put everything you need in the kitchen and put everything you don't need somewhere else. The same thing applies to a hard drive...you can complete tasks more efficiently if you put similar kinds of data on the same partition and put other kinds of data on a different partition (OS and programs on one partition, media on another).

Additionally, system maintenance is easier if the OS and programs are separated from the media. As an example, creating backups is easier if you only have to back up 20GB of data instead of 500GB of data.

[kingwr]

Why do you recommend separating files to a partition. I can see the benefit of having two drive (as both can be reading/writing at the same time effectively doubling the speed). I can't see the benefit of multiple partitions.

You are right, there are no performance benefits to separating OS and recorded TV buffers in different partitions, and, in fact, there may be a performance penalty, in that the partitioning puts these two farther apart on the drive, thus the heads must thrash back-and-forth when you are using Media Center.

The biggest bang for your buck would be to get an SSD for the OS drive. I saw the OCX Agility 3 90GB on Amazon for $99 a couple of days ago. That's pretty cheap and it has done more to improve the performance of my Media Center machine (as well as my office workstation) than memory, processor, graphics card, or any other investment, IMO.

[richard1980]

I don't disagree that the SSD is ultimately the best answer, but I will disagree with you that there is no performance benefit to separating the OS and recordings onto different partitions. There is actually a significant performance boost to a multi-partition scheme versus a single partition scheme. There are two major benefits:

First, as I explained above, a multi-partition scheme keeps all the data that needs to be together on the same part of the drive. When you create a partition, you create a "room" to store data. The smaller the room, the closer the various pieces of data are stored together, which makes it much easier to find data. The larger the room, the further apart data can be spread. With a smaller partition, the result is reduced seek time to find the data necessary to complete a task, which increases performance. To put it in perspective, imagine if your toilet and toilet paper weren't next to each other.

Second, partitions are created from the outside in....from the fastest part of the drive (the outside edges of the platters) to the slowest part of the drive (the inside edges of the platters). This allows you to lock critical data (such as the OS and installed programs) to the fastest part of the drive while keeping less critical data out of that part of the drive.

Combining the two together, creating an OS partition on the outside edge of the drive and separate from the media partition allows you to group the OS files together and lock them to the fastest part of the drive, while keeping the recordings out of the way and in their own section of the drive. This allows you to get the best performance out of the drive.

FWIW, it isn't just me saying this...it's considered best practice to keep the OS and installed programs on their own partition separate from less critical files. Additionally, even Microsoft recognizes the performance benefits to a multi-partition scheme....that's why they recommend putting the page file on its own partition if you don't have a separate physical disk.

[kingwr]

Dammit, Richard, if I saw you had posted the original recommendation, I wouldn't have responded. But now that I have, you are wrong. If data is being read/written simultaneously from OS files and data files, e.g. recorded TV buffer, then placing these in separate partitions will separate these files physically on the disk, requiring farther movements of the heads between reads/writes. This will impact performance of the drive measurably. This is no different from putting log files and data files from a database on separate partitions of the same physical drive, which anyone skilled in the art will tell you is bad for performance. Separate drives, yes, but for one drive, you are better off putting them in the same partition from a purely performance perspective. The reason Microsoft recommends placing OS files in their own partition is so that you can make a machine image of the OS drive that is smaller (because it doesn't include data files or swap files). But if you search you will find articles saying that moving the swap file to its own partition, while the recommended practice, does hurt performance. Also, take a look at the Wikipedia entry for partitions, it backs all this up too.

[richard1980]

Oh, you mean this Wikipedia page, in the section that says "Benefits of multiple partitions", where it specifically points out the exact same things I stated above? Or perhaps this Microsoft KB that explains the benefits to keeping the page file on its own partition?

As for the separation between the data on disk, your theory is irrelevant. Whether you have one partition or 10, it takes the same amount of time for the heads to go from point A to point B. Granted, if you had a lot of free space between A and B, the heads are traveling unnecessary distance, but that's why you don't put a lot of free space between the partitions....in other words, if you only need 25 GB for the OS partition, don't size it at 100 GB. Size it a little bit bigger than 25GB (to account for future space requirements). By doing so, you mimic the best case scenario you would ever see on a single partition drive....OS data on the outermost edge of the platters, followed by media data to the inside of the OS data. Only on a single partition drive, that best case scenario is rarely the actual real world scenario. Most times you'll see data scattered all over the place, even after performing a defrag. You'll end up with a scenario where non-OS data gets intermixed with OS-data, which slows down OS performance. How do you prevent this? Build a barrier to keep them separate....create multiple partitions.