This is the second post in the series on hard drive selection for DVRs. The first post talked a bit about the type of workload that a DVR imposes on the drives and went through some basic ways of measuring raw drive performance.
In this post we’ll take a look at the impact that the filesystem has on I/O performance, again with an emphasis on a DVR recording and playback workload. The filesystem is one of a few system components that we have some control over and that has a great impact on how the drive behaves. The I/O scheduler is another component that we’ll take a look at in a subsequent post. Continue reading “Hard Drives & DVRs: Filesystems”
DVRs revolutionized TV by allowing everyday, non-gadget-oriented people to record shows by simply selecting them from an on-screen guide. You didn’t have to program start time, stop times, and channels by pressing tiny buttons located in the worst possible location of your VCR. Or enter arcane VCR+ codes. With your DVR, you browsed through the guide, found something interesting, and pressed select. Thanks to its program guide data, it knew when that show started and stopped, and which channel it was broadcast on. It even followed time slot changes if the broadcaster decided to shuffle its Sunday lineup.