Can WMC record to two hard drives?

[tootal2]

I want to use two 3tb drives to record the Winter Olympics. How can I make wmc use 2 drives to give me 6tb of drive space?

[tletourneau]

Set them up as a RAID 0 volume? The OS, and therefore WMC, sees it as a single drive.

[adam1991]

In Windows drive setup, you can easily combine multiple drives into one volume. Then tell WMC to record to that volume.

[choliscott]

If you want to combine both drives, you can either use Raid 0, or you can use windows JBOD feature.

If all you're looking for is for WMC to change hard drives automatically when it starts to run out of space, I would look into using WMC Recording Storage Pooler (Google those words)

I want to use two 3tb drives to record the Winter Olympics. How can I make WMC use 2 drives to give me 6tb of drive space?

[holidayboy]

There is this you could look at too maybe:

http://home.comcast.net/~exdeus/WMCReco ... agePooler/

[kd6icz]

I've been thinking of adding storage myself. I never thought 3TB could fill up so fast!

Do you all think RAID 0 would perform better since in theory the hard disk throughput is doubled? Or does it not make that much of a difference?

[adam1991]

Any modern hard drive has more than enough oomph to handle streaming the bits on and off for all your tuners.

Well, unless you have something like twelve of them, and you use them all, and you're streaming recorded TV out to five extenders plus a local TV...

[kd6icz]

Any modern hard drive has more than enough oomph to handle streaming the bits on and off for all your tuners.

Well, unless you have something like twelve of them, and you use them all, and you're streaming recorded TV out to five extenders plus a local TV...

I was planning on adding a ETH 6 to my current PCIe 6. I was only going to allocate 2 of the 6 tuners to my current PC to make a total of 8. Rarely do I use all 6 tuners but there have been times.

I notice hard drive throughput demand significantly increases during fast forward and rewind operations. So let's say I have 4 extenders all doing that at the same time as well as recording on all 8? That's where I was thinking RAID 0 may help.

[blueiedgod]

I've been thinking of adding storage myself. I never thought 3TB could fill up so fast!

Do you all think RAID 0 would perform better since in theory the hard disk throughput is doubled? Or does it not make that much of a difference?

That will depend on the RAID controller. Most cheap ones (or some software based ones), when used as RAID 0 will just write to drive 1, until it is filled up, and then write to drive 2. At least that has been my experience with cheap ones, and I refuse to pay $400 for a real enterprise level RAID controller.

As to storage filling up fast, we are up to 28 TB, yup 28 TB! When you are not limited by the DVR recording storage, you end up recording more stuff than you have time to watch.

[superbob]

That will depend on the RAID controller. Most cheap ones (or some software based ones), when used as RAID 0 will just write to drive 1, until it is filled up, and then write to drive 2. At least that has been my experience with cheap ones, and I refuse to pay $400 for a real enterprise level RAID controller.

I think I will have to have a closer look what WMC does when you add your second drive as a new library for recorded tv. If it is just recording on the new drive or recording using any deleted space on the original drive.

[CyberSimian]

I think I will have to have a closer look what WMC does when you add your second drive as a new library for recorded tv. If it is just recording on the new drive or recording using any deleted space on the original drive.

WMC can record to only one location. When you specify "Other Recorded TV Locations", WMC will read from those locations when you playback recordings, but it will not write to them when you make a recording.

If you really want to spread recording over two or more drives, the no-cost method is to use the "Recording Storage Pooler", as mentioned in an earlier post.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

[TromboneKenny]

I'll warn you what I learned from the last summer Olympics. When you set the series recordings, make sure you specify keep until you delete. I never found a way to easily go back and edit those recordings so they wouldn't cycle off (in bulk). I'm considering that now with the Winter Olympics coming...

[barnabas1969]

Any modern hard drive has more than enough oomph to handle streaming the bits on and off for all your tuners.

Well, unless you have something like twelve of them, and you use them all, and you're streaming recorded TV out to five extenders plus a local TV...

Actually... I've tried that. With 10 tuners recording, and 5 TV's watching... not even a hiccup!

[jjwatmyself]

Here's the math.

An mpeg-2 HD steam from a cable provider is on average 17 Mbps. 10 tuners = 170 Mbps. For recording, that's 21.25 MB/s of data being written, which disks will not even look twice at. A large disk cache helps smooth any bumps plus the OS adds RAM to the equation as additional cache. Windows 8 has good resource monitoring built in to see this up close in task manager. The only addition to this is the LiveTV buffer. But I don't believe it is used when the channel you are watching is being recorded. I.e. it's an either or. This also means that if you have extenders watching LiveTV, you'll see this write throughput to the disk.

If you have network tuners, the tuner traffic is clearly visible on the NIC (RX) as is extender traffic (TX).

If you are using 10 extenders, the network traffic, in the other direction, is the same. I.e. 170 Mbps of TX.

Gigabit required in this scenario which can scale much further.

If there is a disk performance issue, Any stripped raid would resolve. I used to stripe but did away with it as was overkill for three tuners. There are also disks that are rated for IP cameras as do not do error checking. This eliminates hiccups in disk writes.

[barnabas1969]

Agree with post #14. Well, mostly... not many cable channels go over 15Mbps. But... while running all 10 tuners and all 5 TV's, the Windows Resource Monitor only showed the disk queue length to be 0.05. You never want your disk queue higher than 1.0, so 0.05 is just fine.

[superbob]

I think I will have to have a closer look what WMC does when you add your second drive as a new library for recorded tv. If it is just recording on the new drive or recording using any deleted space on the original drive.

WMC can record to only one location. When you specify "Other Recorded TV Locations", WMC will read from those locations when you playback recordings, but it will not write to them when you make a recording.

If you really want to spread recording over two or more drives, the no-cost method is to use the "Recording Storage Pooler", as mentioned in an earlier post.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

Thanks CyberSimian, went with the Recording Storage Pooler

[FlatStanley]

I don't want to put a damper on anyone's post here, but running raid 0 is a dangerous game, if you are storing anything of value. If so, make sure you have a good backup.

[McGary]

I don't want to put a damper on anyone's post here, but running raid 0 is a dangerous game, if you are storing anything of value. If so, make sure you have a good backup.

That's equally true of simply recording to one disk -- you still need backups if you don't want to lose anything. RAID-0 indeed increases the probability of failure, but in essence it's just a "bigger, faster disk" with a higher probability of failure.

You an add some fault-tolerance to it by using RAID-10; or you can simply set up a backup profile that automatically backs up the recordings on a fairly frequent basis. My setup, for example, backs up the entire HTPC recording pool (9TB) to a fault-tolerant storage server with 30TB of space every night.

[barnabas1969]

I don't want to put a damper on anyone's post here, but running raid 0 is a dangerous game, if you are storing anything of value. If so, make sure you have a good backup.

That's equally true of simply recording to one disk -- you still need backups if you don't want to lose anything. RAID-0 indeed increases the probability of failure, but in essence it's just a "bigger, faster disk" with a higher probability of failure.

You an add some fault-tolerance to it by using RAID-10; or you can simply set up a backup profile that automatically backs up the recordings on a fairly frequent basis. My setup, for example, backs up the entire HTPC recording pool (9TB) to a fault-tolerant storage server with 30TB of space every night.

I mostly agree with McGary here. However, using RAID-10 (or any RAID that provides fault-tolerance) is still not a replacement for backups. If your RAID controller fails, you're still out of luck unless you have a backup.

[tletourneau]

I recommend mirrored iSCSI SANs!