Recorded TV folder in Flexraid storage pool. Yes or No?

[zombieagain 7]

Hi,

 

after a tragic hard drive failure I'm finally taking the storage issue more seriously and the first step for me was to get a couple more 4TB hard drive and an esata enclosure. Everything will be delivered later today and I'm planning to install Flexraid (snapshot). I'm wondering if it is ok to set the Recorded TV folder in the storage pool, or if I should maybe use the boot C: drive for it.

 

I read of some issues with setting the Recorded TV folder with Flexraid in another thread, but I think the user was using Transparent RAID.

 

Any suggestions?

 

Thanks!

[politby 88]

Is this for live recording directly to the Flexraid array? If you do this you should try not to record while Flexraid is updating, validating or verifying because those operations are likely to fail.

I recommend you record to a non-pooled drive and use something like Recorded TV Manager to move recordings to the pool when there is no Flexraid maintenance running.

 

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

[zombieagain 7]

I guess another point I should have considered is that WMC doesn't like having the recorded TV folder in a network drive. The esata enclosure is attached to my HTPC for now, but my plan is to have a media server at some point and move the storage unit there. If I only had the free time to do that...

 

So, it seems that is better to maintain a local drive for Recorded TV. My SSD boot drive is a little to small for this purpose.

 

Thanks for the suggestion!

[Guest virtualtinker]

I assume you are talking about my issues when you speak about tRaid.  So I have some additional news regarding it.  Braham released a new patch on 3/20 and as far as I can tell with my testing so far, the problems I had with pointing my Recorded TV folder to live on my storage pool and the asynchronous stream errors have been resolved.  Even the performance options don't crash my SWMC anymore.  The only options that are imperative that you setup is to make the storage pool a non-removable drive to make the drive a valid target for WMC to point to.  You also have to have the storage caching option on.  This option WILL crash SWMC as soon as you start up a live stream if it's not enabled.

 

The only thing left I need to work through is some stuttering, but that's been an issue regardless of where I pointed my transcode directory, so I'm guessing it's simply a matter of not having a powerful enough CPU.  I'll probably look into that more when I have time, but for now, I'm very pleased that the tRaid storage pool looks to be a valid option for where I save my DVR'd items.

[epayson85 72]

I absolutely do not recommend using flexraid with WMC.  I use to and I wasn't even backing it up... I was just using it as a storage pool for my DVR.  I had another backup going for my media drives also using flexraid which worked great.  If you are only using it to back up your recordings, go for it.  If you are adding it to a pool, you will have a lot of issues.  

 

1. Since its a service that boots up and starts the pool... WMC starts before this service and will cause issues when it comes to choosing the recording drive.  It will automatically go back to your pool drive once it appears but not all settings will.  

 

2. If you are using WMC extenders... they will now record to your C:\ drive because they didn't know that your pool drive existed since it wasn't available during boot.  Then the live tv buffers will not be deleted because wmc doesn't even realize it exists.  If you are using a small SSD... it will fill up quick.

 

3. Since the settings tell wmc that recordings are technically in the C:\ drive... but are actually in the pool drive....if you try to watch a recording in progress, fast forward through commercials, and reach the end of what is currently recorded... it will stop playing instead of bring you to live tv.  Also where it stops is only what is currently recorded when you started playing.  THIS IS AWFUL if you enjoy recording the first hour of a sporting event so you can skip commercials through out the game.  You also can't resume where you left off once it stops because it thinks you finished the whole show so you have to fast forward through everything you watched.  

 

I ended up just buying a larger drive and did away with the pool.  Once I did that all the issues went away. I really don't care about backing up my recordings as I watch most of mine right away.  It really only stores crappy house hunter shows and every real house wife show for my girlfriend.  It wouldn't be too hard to ever record any of them again as they all just re-run on tv 24/7.  What I do for backing up now is I built a small server with a celeron processor using windows home server.  It backs up all of my media as well as the OS drives of all my HTPC's.  It automatically turns its self on for backups late at night and then turns its self back off.  I also have everything backed up online using Crashplan which works incredibly well.  I have over 14tb of storage being backed up twice.

[elmo 2]

Maybe check out Starwind iSCSI.  It's free and will mount a server drive as a local drive; WMC won't have a clue it is recording to the network.  I've been running that scenario for years w/o issue on Win 7 x64.