[MPlayer-users] My experience with Maxtor 160GB, LVM, XFS

[Steve Davies]

Hi,

Perhaps some of you use mplayer as part of a "PVR" system like I do.
I've just finished adding a Maxtor 160GB drive to my video system and
thought I'd post my experience in case it helps others.

My motherboard is an Asus with the Promise controller on board to provide
extra IDE channels.

Before the upgrade I had 3 drives and one DVD - 20G system disk and the
DVD on the primary and secondary IDE,  75GB and a 60GB 75GXP drives on the
two Promise channels.

I used LVM 0.9 to concatenate the two big drives and XFS for the file
system.  Kernel was 2.4.10 with LVM, XFS, various other patches.

Thanks to this list, I knew that the 160GB drive will need the IDE
patch with LBA48 support.  Because I couldn't find this patch for 2.4.10,
I was forced to upgrade.

I went to 2.4.18.  I was able to patch that fine with the ide patch for
2.4.18-rc1 without any visible ill effects.  I also patched with the
latest LVM 1.0.3 and with xfs 1.1.  For my analogue video I also made the
recommended patches from www.bytesex.org to support current bttv/bttv2.

I'm happy to provide jumbo-patch of all this relative to stock 2.4.18 if
anyone wants that - drop me a line.

On the hardware side I did make two discoveries:  First is that the
Promise controller cannot support the big drive - it sees only 128GB of
the drive.  Secondly - the Promise controller does not support the ATAPI
DVD drive either.

Consequently I had to put the 160GB on the secondary IDE channel, and move
the DVD drive to slave on the primary.

Using LVM I moved my old 110GB video filesystem on to the new big disk,
then used LVM and xfs_growfs to expand the filesystem to most of the 160GB
and the 75GB drive.  I removed the 60GB drive for the time being.

Result is:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vgdata/video     214G  124G   90G  58% /video

I'm very pleased with the whole process.  If you haven't tried LVM and xfs
file system I encourage you to do so!

The idea that you can get 160GB in a standard IDE drive boggles the mind.
<oldfart>I can remember washing machine sized drives giving far less than
1000th that space...</oldfart>

On the other hand, with video I gobble gigabytes like I used to gobble
megabytes.

Its a shame that the Promise controller (the UDMA100 version) doesn't have
support for >128GB.  I believe that newer versions do.

Incidentally, the Maxtor 160GB drive can be ordered in the "retail"
package which comes with a controller.  But I don't have any spare PCI
slots.

Regards,
Steve Davies