WD AV-GP drive as recording drive?

[jrandeck]

[quote=umdivx]

I did 6 HD recordings, (4 cable card, 2 ATSC) Not sure that 1 more HD stream would make a difference. If I recall correctly that I still had plenty of room to spare when 6 recordings at once.

-Josh

[/quote]

I must have misread your review the first time, or I confused it with a different review.   Looking back I see that you had 6 HD and 4 SD streams, which is pretty impressive in itself. 

ShowAnalyzer seems to be the wrench in the works for me.

[mikinho]

If you use ShowAnalyzer then WD Black SATA III w/ 64MB cache is definitely the way to go.

I’m testing a few other drives now that I’ve moved my SA to my server.  Right now I’m deciding between a WD AV-GP WD20EURS 2TB /SATA II w 64MB Cache and WD Caviar Blue WD10EALX 1TB SATA II w/ 32MB Cache for my primary HTPC.

The Blue is much cheaper and SATA III versus SATA II but the lower cache concerns me for my usage.

[jrandeck]

Well, I just had 7 HD recordings going at once on a single WD10EACS drive (1TB  GreenPower, the original model) with nary a stutter, so I fired up ShowAnalyzer and kept adding threads to see where it would break, but with 7 threads going (one for each show) none of the recordings missed a beat.   I didn’t see any pixelation at all while watching any of the in-progress recordings while this was going on.  I wonder if the optimizations for the AV-GP drives makes them run poorly with ShowAnalyzer.

I guess I’ll quit worrying about whether or not my drives are fast enough to keep up with my tuners.    I suppose if I had 12 tuners it might be a different story 🙂

The odd part was that I expected to see the CPU maxed out by SA, but it was bouncing between 20 and 60% while running the 7 threads.  The SA UI said it was using 9-10 MB/s during this. 

This was on a Core i3 2100T and the drive was pretty freshly formatted with 64K clusters, BTW.

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