My MythTV Gets a Make Over (Just Like My Basement Family Room Did!)

Our basement remodel is done. We've got an awesome family room with bamboo flooring (bought at half price at the Habitat store - environmentally friendly!), recessed dimmable lighting (using CFL's – also environmentally friendly), and all the wires for speakers and such run through the walls! I also just ditched Comcast for Dish. I ordered a second Dish receiver just for the MythTV box.

Now I have the perfect place for my MythTV! I've purchased updated hardware for it and its going to be a really awesome family entertainment computer.

I've replaced my old MythTV guts and used it for the playroom/living room MythTV box. It still works great for all the basics, but it just wasn't going to cut it for my plans for the new MythTV box. It is going to be running all of our daily file and media server needs. I'm going to shut down our old file server to save the electricity. All of its functions (mostly file sharing and backups) will move to the new MythTV.

My MythTV box is called BubbaTV. Bubba's core is the ASUS M3N78 PRO motherboard using an AMD Phenom 9350e processor. Its a 64-bit quad core that runs at 65w. Its great for energy savings, which is something that I'm always looking to do. The case is my trusty Antec Overture Quite Case. I've had it for years and its awesome. Perfect for any home theater PC. Antec doesn't make it any more, but they have a ton of newer HTC cases that blow my good ol' case out of the water.

It has 4GB of RAM. This is far more than a MythTV box needs, but I'm planning to run a virtual session or so of Linux (probably for Asterisk to do VOIP) so the extra RAM will be needed. Its also going to be running lots of web services, an LDAP directory service, and frankly, I'm loading this baby up with stuff. RAM is cheap!

But frankly, the thing I'm most excited about is the external RAID 5 array. I purchased the Venus T5 which includes a SATA card for external eSATA connections. I also purchased 6 1TB drives. Once they got down to the $100 range it just made sense.

One of the 1 TB drives is in use in the box as the boot drive. At some point I'll get another one and put them in a RAID 1 mirror for redundancy. Why such a large drive for the OS? Well if I ever have issues with the external array I'll have plenty of space to limp along with on just one internal drive.

The other 5 drives are loaded in the external array and setup using Linux's software RAID using RAID5. This gives me some redundancy and some speed enhancements at the expense of some CPU cycles. But let' not forget that I'm running a quad core CPU that will be lucky to hit 20% usage most of the time. CPU I've got plenty of.

With my current setup I have the following partitions setup.

root - /dev/sda1 – 28 GB

swap - /dev/sda2 – 8 GB

var - /dev/sda3 – 896 GB

home - /dev/md0 – 3.6 TB

Yep you read that right! 3.6 Terra bytes. The sad thing is that I'll probably fill that up as fast as I've ever filled anything previously.

I've just finished setting up the RAID 5 array and its running rock solid. I'm really happy with it. My next task is to get the Logitech PlayStation 3 bluetooth keyboard/trackpad working reliably with Ubuntu. They really didn't do things well with Ubuntu 9.04 and bluetooth. Its easy to connect the keyboard/mouse but if the PC sleeps or reboots you have to reconnect the whole thing again. What's the point of a remote keyboard/mouse if you have to walk up to the PC and use a USB keyboard to reattach the wireless one? I'm sure I'll find a solution. When I do I'll post it here!