[mojo]

Grr, issues started happening that I thought I had all sorted, but at least I think i know why it's happening now. Most of my linux box is for storage, but one of the 250 GB drives I use exclusively to record TV on from my homebrew DVR. It has it's own 200 GB drive, and I let it use up to 150 GB on the linux drive through a samba share. Recently files started to become well, scrambled. They will randomly freeze, and if you fast forward or rewind you end up in a completely different spot. This only happens on files that happen to get recorded to the linux box, not the local windows drive for the DVR. I took a look at the files and tried to move them around and they went really slow, leading me to think they are pretty fragmented. So I moved them all to a different directory and copied them back. No more fragmentation and problem solved. Or so I thought.

So tonight it started happening again. I've just now realized that it started happening when I added a 3rd tuner, allowing the recording of 3 shows simultaneously. Since the software I use is pretty smart about balancing data loads, with the 2 tuners in the past any one of the 2 possible data locations was only recording one show at a time, but now my linux box can end up recording 2 shows at the same time, which I'm pretty sure is what is causing the problem.

The recordings take up about 2GB per hour, which works out to about 4.5 megabits/s. I have a gigabit network connecting everything, so I'm pretty sure it's not a network issue.

If I changed the one drive in linux from ext3 to XFS you think it would solve the problem, or should I set up a 3rd data location on another drive? One last thing to think about is that the makers of the DVR software (SageTV) recommend a 64K block size, which I have followed for its local drive, but the max for ext3 is 4k, which I've been using thus far.