Poll (please): Time-shifting Performance

Hello,

Am a programmer. Hadn't bought a pc in a long while. Was making do
with a 233mhz Pentium. Started browsing ebay one day, and had been
thinking about, and so I embarked on building a system. Point is, had
to pretty much take a crash course in the newer hardware out there, and
of course, this included the video card, a 128MB ATI All-In-Wonder 9600,
in a 4X AGP slot (see system specs below).

I'm recording television on an Ultra2 SCSI RAID 0 array consisting of 9
WD9150 drvies connected to a 3 channel Mylex 1164p.

My question is, what sort of time-shifting performance are people
getting with their set-ups? Like, in terms of playing back, and
recording, and moving around (rewind, fastforward), and getting
noticible framedrops in what's being recorded while doing the moving
around? What's the longest recording duration people are getting, while
still getting good performance while moving around?

I'm getting good performance (no frame drops that I can see) when moving
around while recording, but with playback close to the beginning of the
recording -- the further out playback is toward the end of the recording
(beyond a certain recording duration), the worse recording quality (more
frame drops). You might think this is due to track posistion, but I've
experimented with slicing the array up into several equal sized
partitions, and performance is not dependent on which partition I use.

Doesn't seem like this could be a function of memory buffer.

Over all, I'm guessing I'm getting pretty good performance. That is, I
don't think what I'm seeing is neccessarily unusal. I wonder though, if
there's a way to make it better; perhaps maybe there's a shortcomming in
the tv software (stock from ATI card).

The system consists of:

Tyan s2462 (the first dual amd board)
2 1.2Ghz Athlon MPs
WD2000 HDD
512MB PC2100 (EEC, DDR)
Mylex 1164P 3 channel Ultra2 SCSI RAID adapter (64bit, 33mhz)
9 WD9150 SCSI HDD array
Viewsonic E70 Monitor (running at 100mhz refresh, next to lowest
resolution)

Bryan

Man, this must be like, the most unsucessful poll in history .

Can anyone tell me, discuss with me, ati tivo performance? I found stuff
googling on time shifting, but strangely, there are no performance
specifications in terms of what I described below. Be interesting to
compare with non-pc computer implementations too -- black box television set
hardware stuff.

Bryan

Bryan Hoover wrote:

Hello,

Am a programmer. Hadn't bought a pc in a long while. Was making do
with a 233mhz Pentium. Started browsing ebay one day, and had been
thinking about, and so I embarked on building a system. Point is, had
to pretty much take a crash course in the newer hardware out there, and
of course, this included the video card, a 128MB ATI All-In-Wonder 9600,
in a 4X AGP slot (see system specs below).

I'm recording television on an Ultra2 SCSI RAID 0 array consisting of 9
WD9150 drvies connected to a 3 channel Mylex 1164p.

My question is, what sort of time-shifting performance are people
getting with their set-ups? Like, in terms of playing back, and
recording, and moving around (rewind, fastforward), and getting
noticible framedrops in what's being recorded while doing the moving
around? What's the longest recording duration people are getting, while
still getting good performance while moving around?

I'm getting good performance (no frame drops that I can see) when moving
around while recording, but with playback close to the beginning of the
recording -- the further out playback is toward the end of the recording
(beyond a certain recording duration), the worse recording quality (more
frame drops). You might think this is due to track posistion, but I've
experimented with slicing the array up into several equal sized
partitions, and performance is not dependent on which partition I use.

Doesn't seem like this could be a function of memory buffer.

Over all, I'm guessing I'm getting pretty good performance. That is, I
don't think what I'm seeing is neccessarily unusal. I wonder though, if
there's a way to make it better; perhaps maybe there's a shortcomming in
the tv software (stock from ATI card).

The system consists of:

Tyan s2462 (the first dual amd board)
2 1.2Ghz Athlon MPs
WD2000 HDD
512MB PC2100 (EEC, DDR)
Mylex 1164P 3 channel Ultra2 SCSI RAID adapter (64bit, 33mhz)
9 WD9150 SCSI HDD array
Viewsonic E70 Monitor (running at 100mhz refresh, next to lowest
resolution)

Bryan