Quad Core On Its Way !

[merrypig]

Originally Posted by Joey Z

Just an update. Still going strong after all this time. Only problem so far has been some bad usb tuner boxes. Hopefully within a year I will be able to build my 20 tuner PCI version to "upgrade" this current system.

Just a heads up - You may find some trouble with the memory space allocated per card for the pci memory mapping unless you can run on a 64 bit os/capture card/drivers and get a larger virtual address space to play with than a 32 bit os /mobo has.

[Darkk]

Originally Posted by Joey Z

No need for a Blu-Ray burner as there was another Terabyte drive added to that Red Devil, and I have an 8 Terabyte drive array on order! Very rarely does stuff get burnt on to disk.

8TB drive array on order?? Sheesh. Surprised ya didn't also order a LTO3 tape backup drive for it. The 10-12 slot autoloader by Dell is around $6,000 which isn't too bad for Enterprise environment.

Darkk

[DonK]

You could build a 20+ drive array with a good SATA port multiplier controller card and a few external 8 port hard drive towers with hot swap trays... Imagine 20 1TB drives set up with BTV... That's what I'm going to set up my WHS server with, but probably will go with a Multilane vs PM setup so that speed isn't affected. That's about the only downside to PM rigs, you're bottlenecked to the single cable going back to the controller for multiple drives.

[Zogg]

FWIW I just upgraded my BTV server to an AMD Phenom 9500 quad core cpu and ECS motherboard. I went with this combo because it was about $100 cheaper than I was seeing an Intel Q6600 m/b combo for at Fry's, and the ECS m/b has 3 PCI slots. I'm running it at stock speed, 2.2GHz, with 4GB DDR2 memory. I also had to pick up a PCIe video card so I got a fanless Sapphire HD2400HDXT from Newegg to go with it.

So far I am very pleased with this setup. I was running out of gas at times with my Sempron 3200, if multiple recordings were stopping and starting at the top of the hour and we were watching a show on the Link system in the family room. In this case all shows were HD being recorded from the HDHR's. Apparently the cpu just couldn't keep up with all the disk I/O and stuff going on for about 15 seconds and the show on the Link system would stutter very badly.

Although a big test hasn't happened yet, so far the Phenom has lived up to its name. We've seen no stuttering at all at the top of the hour changes, and I've even turned on up to 2 post-processing tasks (comskip instead of SmartSkip) to run immediately. It's early yet, but so far I am extremely pleased with this cpu. Gigabyte also has a compatible m/b that I would probably recommend over the ECS, but in this case I went with the cheaper combo deal and so far it's paying off.

Z

[Jakesty]

Zogg, with all of those HD recordings you probably had a lot of streamsnipping going on too. Your cpu wasn't probably too much of a bottleneck as possibly your drive configuration, until of course you had smartskip or streamsnip kick in. Good luck with the ECS. I've just had the best luck with Gigabyte for the last couple of years, so I won't really need to look outside that family of systems for a while. My HTPC is an intel, and the pressler 930 just runs so hot, the newest C2D cpus are nice and cold.

[Zogg]

Actually with HDHR recordings there is no streamsnipping since it only records the desired program stream, and I used to have smartskip deferred until the middle of the night. And I did also think that it was a disk I/O bottleneck, so to test I had some of my recordings go to a different drive on a different controller (I had a combination of PATA and SATA drives) but that didn't help the problem. Throwing a newer cpu/memory/chipset combo at it seemed to be the only way to overcome the problem, and that has proven to be correct.

I was going to go with Intel C2D but after reading good reviews on the AMD Phenom I decided to give it a try. It won't beat an Intel quad core in performance, but it also costs less. I hadn't seen anyone here mention using an AMD quad core so I wanted to mention my experiences with it for anyone else who is interested in using it.

Z

[Nick Burns]

Originally Posted by Zogg

Actually with HDHR recordings there is no streamsnipping since it only records the desired program stream

NOTE: Except for OTA recordings.

[Joey Z]

Just a little FYI

This system has been running for pretty much a full year non stop recording 20+ hours per day. BTV has never crashed, nor have I had any major issues that I could not resolve with a few clicks.

Just wanna give my thanks to the snapstream guys for making a great product.

[Nick Burns]

I've lost my place in this thread... would you mind posting the final specs of your system?

[Joey Z]

Hey nick, here is how the system stands as of right now.

Dell XPS 710:
Intel® Core™2 Extreme QX6700 (8MB L2 Cache,2.66GHz,1066 FSB)
Operating System:
Genuine Windows® XP Professional with re-installation CD WPXP
Memory:
4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz - 4 DIMMs 4GB64
Hard Drive:
1.5TB Performance RAID 0 (2 x 750GB SATA 3Gb/s 7200 RPM HDDs)
2nd Hard Drive:
500GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™ 500SB Optical Drive:
3rd Hard Drive
1 TB Seagate ES
Dual Drives: 48x Combo + 16x DVD+/-RW w/ dbl layer write capable COM6DVR
Video Cards:
768MB nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX NV8800
Sound Cards:
Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ XtremeMusic (D) Sound Card XFI
1 Kilowatt Power Supply
15 Hauppague USB2 DVR's
15 Direct TV D-12 300 boxes

This is a dedicated BTV machine with nothing else on it except Nero. I have about 10 BTVL clients on it at any one time. I am still running 4.71 on it as I have not had time to upgrade the BTV puter and all of the BTVL clients to 4.8.

Still in the process of waiting for management to cut me a check so that I can start on the 12TB drive array.

[btvfreak]

Originally Posted by doctah

So Joey...

The D11's use USB tuning right? I had mine (yes...just one ) using a USB > Serial > Null cable > computer config, but with my new system, I no longer have a serial port on my box. It looks to me you're using a single computer to control them all? Please elaborate.

Agreed. How do you control each of the boxes? Serial cable? If so, then did you need to use the DTV serial control hack? Please give us the details of how you control each box. That system is insane!

[Joey Z]

Just to update this thread....

I am back to using 4.7 due to some issues with 4.8 . Will end up waiting for the next release until I update.
JZ

[Joey Z]

Update:

Still no issues with my revert back to 4.7. Looks like I will be on this version for a while and will not upgrade.

On the 12TB array, looks like I wont be doing that............. .....................I just placed an order for a 15TB array !!!!!!!! should have it by weeks end.

[rdb4133]

.... and I thought my 4 analog (two PCI Dual Tuner Cards), with a 250GB and 500GB drive was a lot! 15TB's!!! That's crazy!

[Joey Z]

Originally Posted by rdb4133

.... and I thought my 4 analog (two PCI Dual Tuner Cards), with a 250GB and 500GB drive was a lot! 15TB's!!! That's crazy!

using a drive for a hot spare it only comes out to 12.7TB total.