Storage solutions

[blitzkrg]

I am currently running 160gb hd, for 2 tuners, and OS and the buffers of both tuners. I've been running this setup through all the beta's without any major issues.. but now i've run out of space.. so it's time to upgrade.
arriving today will be 2x 200gb hard drives. 7200rpm 8mb cache
so i'll have 400gb of space (should keep the wife happy for a while at least)

my question is for those that have large hd setup.. what solution have you found that works best?
I need to fit and OS, buffers for 2 tuners and storage for 2 tuners.
i'm considering the following options.
1) 1 large 400gb virtual drive
2) OS & buffers & 1 tuner on 1 hard drive and other tuner on other hd
3) OS & 1 tuner on 1 drive, buffers & tuner on 2nd drive

suggestions?

[Pilk]

Personally I would go with a 400G stripe, if your able to RAID it. The only problem is 1 drive failure will cause loss of all data on both drives. If you are using XP to create a virtual partition from both drives, I would go that route as well.

For some reason if you want to segment your recordings out -- you could use 1 physical drive for "old" recordings and the other for "live" recording.

Just my two cents.

My personal PVR box is a (2x Segate 7.2k RPM 200G) 400G SATA RAID 0 array, with a 40G HD for the system volume. Works like a charm on 3.4, but then again I am not using more then one tuner -- since 3.5 is the debeeeeeil!

[Cal]

I have
a 10gb c: drive for the OS.
and a 440gb that is a virtual drive. (used for buffers and storage)
the physical drives are a 200 and a 250.

I suggest option 4.
small drive for the OS.
all the rest in one big virtual drive.

That way you can use the default for everything without worrying. If you setup one tuner or certain shows to other then the default you always have to worry about running out of space even if you have more space on another drive.

[btvbuddy]

You could consider the following

BIGDISK-1 Small-Partition
BIGDISK-1 Large-Partition
BIGDISK-2 Small-Partition
BIGDISK-2 Large-Partition

Using it as follows

OS runs from BIGDISK-1 Small-Partition
PCI tuner 1 records to BIGDISK-1 Large-Partition
PCI tuner 2 records to BIGDISK-2 Large-Partition

Use Norton Ghost to backup your OS config to BIGDISK-2 Small-Partition

When recording from each tuner that activity goes to separate drives plus when (not if) your system gets wacked out you restore with Norton Ghost from BIGDISK-2 Small-Partition

Good luck!

I would also recommend getting some external storage for increasing the portability of your files.