I have a 12 disk IDE system (MOBO only supports 1.5 SATA) that will be getting 3 new 1TB drives all SATA.  One will be my new parity drive.

 

What's a good size for a cache drive?  Would it be worth it to have a 1TB cache drive or is that overkill?

 

I want to recored tv shows from my 2 MCE machines straight to unraid (I have a gb lan).  I have 2 analog tunners in one computer and 1 hd in another.  So has anyone tested to see how many streams can be sent to unraid at once?

 

 

The 1.5 SATA ports will not hold yoiu back.  The drives are not fast enough to fill even that size pipe, except from cache.  I would not think these additions would slow down your system.

 

As far as cache drive size. I think 1T is overkill.  To determine how much space you need, just monitor your array for 1 day to see how much you are adding.  If you are adding 1T a day, you'd need a 1T drive.  But my guess is that 250-500G would be more than enough.  My cache disk is 300G and I have not come close to filling it in a day (but it is not doing TV duty - at least not yet).

 

I'll leave for someone else to answer the questions about simultaneous write streams to unRAID.  I don't have any experience.

Please let me know if you are successful at recording TV recordings to your unRaid box. I am running MCE2005 & would love to do this.

 

Phil 

Yeah right now I have my mce 2005 box with an HD card writing to the server (no cache drive yet and all IDE)

 

Works fine...

Now I ask a dumb question. How are you doing that?

 

I have mapped the usershare as a mapped drive & cannot get MCE2005 to allow me to record to the mapped drive. Any help would be appreciated.

I tried a lot of different things (tweak mce...dynamic links) but in the end ended up using this method http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/118648.aspx and haven't had a problem since.

 

MCE likes to change the location of the recorded tv back to default at almost any chance it gets if it doesn't detect the network drive so the above link works great. 

Thanks for the help. I'll give it a try.

 

Phil