Quad tuners...will drive speed matter?

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brennok

[H]ard|Gawd
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Nov 30, 2006
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I tried searching but I didn't have any luck. I am planning on throwing 2 dual Qam tuners in my secondary setup with a very good chance we will be running all four tuners at the same time come the new fall season.

Will I be okay with the Green series by Western Digital or would I be better off with the Black series? I wasn't sure how intensive it was to have all four tuners running at the same time.

Current Specs:
Intel C2D E6750
Abit IP35 Pro
2x1GB DD2 1066
Audigy 2 ZS
Avermedia Duet x 2...on order waiting for Dell to ship

I plan on running Windows 7 for Media Center unless I end up finding another DVR program I prefer.
 
I think you'll be ok with a regular blue drive. I use a seagate 1.5tb with 3 hd recordings at once and haven't noticed any problems. You could always get a WD 640gb drive since those are about as quick as the older raptors.
 
FYI, media center used to only support dual tuners out of the box..... i dont know if it was upped in 7. I think there used to be a registry hack to bypass that, but i cant be sure.

Each stream is going to be 20megabit/sec, so x 4 = 80mbit/sec. Which should be well within what a modern drive can handle, as long as you dont have anything else using the drive causing random accesses which drastically decreases the throughput the drive can handle.
 
With how little more a Black drive costs, I'd just get one of those.

Currently I use a pair of 640Gb black drives for my recordings and they work great.
 
Thanks everyone. Yeah Windows 7 supports quad tuners out of the box and setup was a breeze. I had the tuners just long enough to make sure I was happy with them but I didn't think to test whether it would have problems running all four tuners at the same time. I found them cheaper through Dell so I returned my original purchase and now I am just waiting for my order to ship which of course is backordered.

I ended up ordering both a green and black drive through the Dell sale. I figured for the price it was worth it but not enough to get both from the black series. This way I can record on Black and just dump to green for space if needed. Worst case I can swap one of the 500gb out of my Ex485 and throw in the green drive.
 
I have had a couple of incomplete recordings and can't figure out why. The guide data shows an hour show but only 15-21 minutes is actually recorded even though it says an hour was recorded. Now tonight I had heavy pixelation and the video became unplayable about halfway through. Is this a possible hard drive issue, bad tuner, or something else? This is over clearqam so I shouldn't have any signal issues and my Tivo HDs recorded the same show fine.
 
I had heavy pixelation and the video became unplayable about halfway through.
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With four tuners, I would take a good look at your signal quality first. You might need an amplifier if you don't have one already.
 
Demon10000 said:
With four tuners, I would take a good look at your signal quality first. You might need an amplifier if you don't have one already.
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+1 I had a Hauppauge 2250 and a ATI 650 combo tuner and the signal sucked on one and it made for very bad recording. In my case I just removed it since the likelyhood of wanting to record 3 OTA DTV shows at the same time is very limited. That and having two bunny ears in the bedroom just looked wrong.
 
Demon10000 said:
With four tuners, I would take a good look at your signal quality first. You might need an amplifier if you don't have one already.
Click to expand...

I don't remember an option to check signal levels. Is there one buried in the menus that I am unaware of?
 
You should be OK with the Green drive. It is my understanding that WD optimized the f/w for multiple video streams.

For those recommending Blue and Black, keep in mind these drives are louder than the green series and can contribute to a more noisy HTPC experience.
 
For clearQAM, you check signal strength by going to the Guide -> Right click or use info button on the channel -> Choose edit channel -> Select edit sources and at the bottom you can see the quality percentage
 
I used a standard 7200rpm drive and had 2 PVR250 and 1 Nvidia dual tuner and no issues with write speeds.
 
SC385 said:
For clearQAM, you check signal strength by going to the Guide -> Right click or use info button on the channel -> Choose edit channel -> Select edit sources and at the bottom you can see the quality percentage
Click to expand...

Yeah I am showing 100% right now but for all I know this could have dipped while it was recording.
 
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