To buy or not to buy a new harddrive?
Back in April when I bought the machine that would become my MythTV box I knew that 320Gb wasn’t huge (for Myth) but acceptable (and 3 times larger than the 100Gb across 2 disks I’d had up to then). But I always said I’d wait for a 750Gb drive to hit the £100 mark and buy one. The difference is I thought that would take until the end of the year but it’s here now. And my main drive is 9Gb (or 3-6 hours) off full. I say main drive because I’ve now got an external drive which holds my music, videos and archived recordings – i.e. older recordings which I’ve not yet watched but which have been pushed onto the slower external drive (they play fine, just take a second or two to start). In total I’ve got 500Gb used.
So 750Gb would only be a step up of 250Gb. I know, I know ‘only’ but in Myth terms it’s not huge. But it would allow me to bring my external drive stuff back on to an internal drive – which would make the whole thing run a little better (if I’m scrolling past a recording on the external drive it’s noticeably slower.) And it’d give me a little room for expansion.
So why not buy it? Well because I could wait and buy 1Tb in a few months for similar money (currently around £200) and because I’m still a little bit skint after buying the house and because it’s only a small step up in size. See if I bought a silly amount of disc – 5Tb say – then I could use Myth in a slightly different way – where you let it record all sorts of stuff, some based on generic rules (every new pilot, every film with a > 2.5 star rating etc) and then weed out what’s worth watching at your leisure. But ultimately, and especially since I’m not buying silly amounts of disc, if you record at a faster rate than you watch then you’re always going to run out of space eventually.