While everything worked OK, deletes took rather a long time. A bit of investigation revealed with the large disk have 4KB sectors and that there is an issue with logical-physical sector alignment. There's more here http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-4kb-sector-disks/. So I used parted to repartition and properly align as follows:
# parted /dev/sdX # Set units to sectors (in this case 512B): (parted) unit s (parted) rm Partition number? 1 (parted) print Model: ATA WDC WD15EARS-00Z (scsi) Disk /dev/sdb: 2930277168s Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: gpt Number Start End Size File system Name Flags (parted) mkpart Partition name? []? File system type? [ext2]? Start? 64 End? -1 Warning: You requested a partition from 64s to 2930277167s. The closest location we can manage is 64s to 2930277134s. Is this still acceptable to you? Yes/No? Yes (parted) print Model: ATA WDC WD15EARS-00Z (scsi) Disk /dev/sdb: 2930277168s Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: gpt Number Start End Size File system Name Flags 1 64s 2930277134s 2930277071s (parted) quit Information: You may need to update /etc/fstab.All is now VERY well with much improved performance.
With the new 2 TB disk there are no space issues (1 TB was occasionally a bit tight).
Between OTA recordings from MythTV, XBMC internet content, Net Flicks and ROKU we have better content choices than with cable TV. Project is a great success.
2 comments:
I'm slow to getting around to this. (Two kids age 3 and 1...enough said.) However, I'm comfortable enough with Ubuntu having messed around with it for a few months on a Craigslist second hand Dell box. Ubuntu isn't as performance-efficient as advertised (still slow with 1GB of RAM), but I've done experiments with it as a backup NAS (Grsync) and played around with XBMC as a naked front end, and installed a DLNA server (Serviio). At least I understand the OS, the file system, and how to make it do things.
My "Fire Time Warner" plan moving forward is to get a better Craigslist device, drop about 4GB of RAM and 2TB drive in it, then run MythTV alone as a PVR and front end for strictly OTA recording. I use my Sony BRAVIA Blu-Ray as a Hulu interface, so the PVR machine doesn't need to do much more than about 5-10 OTA episodes per week. I'm very concerned about system resources and cost, so I want to keep the scope of the device as limited as possible. However, if performance holds up, then I might try dumping the recorded shows onto the DLNA server and access all of it through my blu-ray player's streamer.
Congrats on a successful project against Comcast. David beats Goliath!
I'm not really a David, just a techie who got tired of Comcast abuse and cable TV prices generally. It's interesting that the technology isn't really hard or, necessarily, expensive particularly when you trade it off against cable TV prices. There is clearly an alternative to poor service and high price.
One thing you might want to look into is first run broadcast TV hosted on the programs web site. There's a good deal of it though it comes with commercials. Still it's not hard to record it and fast forward through the commercials if they are uninteresting or excessive.
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