300gb hard drive - advice

blorg

I'm getting a new hard drive for my system as I need more space. It's currently 2 x 120gb 7200PRM hard drives, and I'm thinking of replacing one of these with Maxtor's new 300gb drive. (Has to be a replacement as the machine is a Shuttle - not a lot of room in there.) Now this is only available as a 5400RPM model - I'm presuming that this is unlikely to cause me any problems? (OS, applications, swap file will still be on the 7200RPM drive.)

The space will be used for mp3s and TV recording. The TV recording is compressed to mpeg before it ever hits the drive, so I'm presuming that I'm not going to hurt with only 5400RPMs?

Kali

Depends on your CPU & encoding method.. whether it would actually be quicker than the drive could handle also theres only a small buffer on that drive as well.
I'd try and locate a few benchmarks just to be sure before purchasing it.. or else use the 120GB drive for direct recording and the 300GB for later storage.

Stark

Make sure your system can handle a 300GB drive as well. I think you need 48-bit LBA or something to handle drives larger than 160GB. (a guy I know had this problem, didn't even get a meaningful error message, the drive just got to writing past 160GB and when it went past 160GB it just cycled around to the first byte on the hard drive, overwriting his boot record, FAT tables etc.)

blorg

I don't think the video stream would be too much for the drive, it's only around 4Mbps (that's bits). The hard drive would be much quicker than that. As you suggest I could try recording to the faster drive if necessary.

I'm aware of the >137gb issue, Shuttle tech told me that the computer supported larger drives and that they had tested it with a 200gb drive but not a 300gb one. If it supports a 200gb drive, am I right in presuming that a 300gb drive should work?

Stark

yeah 300gb should be fine if it can support 200gb

blorg

Great, ordered it now, thanks for the advice guys. Fingers crossed that it will all work OK.

Gerry

Yeah, should work fine. 5400 rpm drives aren't terribly slow, they would still be capable of a sustained 10mb write at least. Just as a matter of interest, what tivo software are you using, and what OS? Looking at putting a similar machine together when I go home, though with the minimum possible spec.

PrecariousNuts

Another option could have been a 250 GB External drive. I recently got a nice Western Digital one. Its USB2.0 and 7200 rpm.

blorg

I considered that but decided that I didn't want an extra box and power supply hanging around. I'm not sure that a 7200RPM external drive would actually prove faster than a 5400RPM internal one. Also, the internal drives are cheaper!

PrecariousNuts

Whats your shuttle like? I've got one coming tomorrow.

blorg

It's a SK41G, which was the cheapest I could get at the time. XP2000, 512mb RAM, DVD+-R and hopefully now 420gb of hard drive space when I get my new drive.

I'm very happy with it, it does everything that I need it to do (which is record TV, download/store/playback mp3s, and backup my laptop which is my main machine). It's plugged into the TV for watching the stuff it records; otherwise controlled through terminal services on a wireless LAN; it doesn't have a monitor and sits unobtrusively on a bookshelf.

They are more fiddly to put together than a normal PC simply because the space is so small, but I don't really need to get into it very often once it is assembled, so this is only an occasional issue.

irishguy

what OS are you running it on?? one of the linux media station projects or WinXP Media Theater?

blorg

Normal Windows XP (Pro) with the software that came with the card (Pinnacle PC TV pro). The software is awful but it does work. I’ll try to get [URL=http:\\www.showshifter.com]Showshifter[/URL] or Snapstream to work when I get a chance. Both integrate well with Digiguide, which is a very good EPG for Ireland.

I am amazed by the scarcity of good '10 foot' user interfaces - most I've tried is completely unusable without a mouse and keyboard. Showshifter is the only exception.

blorg

The 300gb drive is installed now, and seems to be working OK, was recognised by the computer as 279.39gb (although I did need to install Service Pack 1 and run a utility from Maxtor). It's currently formatting away in two 139.7Gb partitions; what do people think of this idea? (The drive is going to be storing very large files exclusively, and NTFS is meant to be quite efficient with cluster sizes even on large partitions I believe.)