Hi, I have a very small HTPC. I'm using an MSI E350IA motherboard with the AMD E-350 APU. I have enough room in my case for the InfiniTV4 and a 500GB hard drive. Although this setup is adequate, I find that loading up WMC is a bit slow and my hard drive gets filled up rather quickly (I have 3 kids who are always recording cartoon shows).
I would like to replace my 500GB hard drive with a 120GB SSD drive. This will speed up load times of WMC as well as other media programs I have installed on my HTPC, but it will severly limit my recording space.
I built a media server that I have connected to my gigabit router (my house is wired with Cat 6 ethernet cable). It has 2TB of storage space available. What I would like to do is to set my recordings to record directly onto my media server. I have my media server set up as a mapped network drive on my HTPC. I would like to know if it's possible to set my TV Record folder as the media server mapped network drive and not record anything on the SSD drive that is physically in my HTPC. And if it is possible, are there any settings I need to change in order to make it happen.
Thanks
Recording TV on external hard drive
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mark11374
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erkotz
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Windows Media Center does not officially support recording to network drives. Some people have gotten it to work by editing the registry, with varying degrees of success. It may or may not work well, depending on your environment.
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JohnW248
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There are a number of reason why I wouldn't do that. Remember there is no such thing as live tv and that would mean the "buffer" would be on the NAS along with other network traffic. This gets a bit messy when you have a couple of shows recording and are watching a program and maybe have an extender in the mix as well. Media Center wants to record to a DAS drive and not a NAS although there are those that have hacked the registry to be able to use a NAS.
The solution I use is a DAS device from Sans Digital which houses four or five Sata drives (depending on what you get) and comes with a card with external eSata ports. The units themselves have port multiplers so that with the standard two port eSata card you could have two five drive towers each loaded with five 3TB drives.
This works well for me and I have four of them on my Dell and four on my HP machine as well.
One word of advice based on experience, you are better off setting them up as JBOD or pass through if you want that many drive letters...one tower I set to a Raid 0 and actually the overhead of running the software raid on top of everything else makes that drive slower when it is the recorded tv target and I would get stalls on live tv (although all the recordings have been fine). The other 3 towers on the Dell as set as JBOD and have either a set of 3TB or 2TB drives depending when they went into service and how much money I had at the time. The current Rocket Raid card that Sans Digital supplies with the Towers will support 6GB drives but ALL the drives have to be 6GB and if there are any slower drives on that controller then the speed drops to the slowest speed.
The other advantage here is each tower has its own power so there is no overhead on your HTPC power supply.
The other way to do this would be a single external drive on eSata/USB/FW which will work as well.
Having a single drive, as you are finding out, puts a lot of overhead on that drive handling both the OS and the recording buffers and playback. A SSD will certainly improve your boot time, but I doubt you'll see any change in MC response.
The solution I use is a DAS device from Sans Digital which houses four or five Sata drives (depending on what you get) and comes with a card with external eSata ports. The units themselves have port multiplers so that with the standard two port eSata card you could have two five drive towers each loaded with five 3TB drives.
This works well for me and I have four of them on my Dell and four on my HP machine as well.
One word of advice based on experience, you are better off setting them up as JBOD or pass through if you want that many drive letters...one tower I set to a Raid 0 and actually the overhead of running the software raid on top of everything else makes that drive slower when it is the recorded tv target and I would get stalls on live tv (although all the recordings have been fine). The other 3 towers on the Dell as set as JBOD and have either a set of 3TB or 2TB drives depending when they went into service and how much money I had at the time. The current Rocket Raid card that Sans Digital supplies with the Towers will support 6GB drives but ALL the drives have to be 6GB and if there are any slower drives on that controller then the speed drops to the slowest speed.
The other advantage here is each tower has its own power so there is no overhead on your HTPC power supply.
The other way to do this would be a single external drive on eSata/USB/FW which will work as well.
Having a single drive, as you are finding out, puts a lot of overhead on that drive handling both the OS and the recording buffers and playback. A SSD will certainly improve your boot time, but I doubt you'll see any change in MC response.