Friday, 04 August 2006

So it seems I was a bit quick to declare the USB controller a dud last night.

Overnight, Simon Richter attested on IRC that he also had a USB controller bearing the same PCI ID, and his worked fine. (Although his had the option for extra power from the floppy drive power cable, which I find interesting. Mine does not).

So tonight I worked through the various combinations to get to the bottom of the problem. I put a Sun QFE card in that PCI slot to make sure the riser and the slot were working correctly. It worked fine.

Then I put the USB controller back in and tried a USB thumb drive, that worked.

So I immediately narrowed in on the hard drive itself, and the IDE-USB adapter. I tried it on my laptop. Nothing. Aha. So I tried the hard drive directly with IDE, and it worked. So I assumed that the IDE-USB adapter must have been faulty, and tried a different one. It worked. I cycled through the other three IDE-USB adapters, and they all worked. Then I tried again with the one from last night, and it too worked!

I can only presume that in my haste, or with my fuzzy head (I've got a cold or the 'flu or something), I managed to connect the IDE-USB adapter to the hard drive incorrectly. Don't ask me how, considering it's a keyed interface, but it's not the first time I've managed to screw up plugging in an IDE hard drive.

Anyway, with that hurdle behind me now, I made four physical volumes out of the disks (no partitions at all), and then made a volume group, and a single logical volume that is striped across all four physical volumes (yes, I know if I have a disk failure I can kiss the lot goodbye, but I'm in performance testing mode at the moment). I then exported that logical volume with vblade and mounted it on what will be my MythTV box.

apollock@teevee:~$ df -Th
Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/Debian-root
              ext3    259M  156M   90M  64% /
tmpfs        tmpfs    502M     0  502M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1     ext3    228M   25M  192M  12% /boot
/dev/mapper/Debian-home
              ext3     63G  295M   59G   1% /home
/dev/mapper/Debian-tmp
              ext3    368M  8.1M  340M   3% /tmp
/dev/mapper/Debian-usr
              ext3    4.7G  1.7G  2.8G  38% /usr
/dev/mapper/Debian-var
              ext3    2.9G  897M  1.8G  33% /var
tmpfs        tmpfs     10M  124K  9.9M   2% /dev
/dev/etherd/e0.0
               jfs    1.5T  2.2G  1.5T   1% /mnt

I've currently got bonnie++ hammering away at the "disk" to see what sort of performance I'll get, and whether it'll be fast enough to record TV.

Now I just need the TV tuner card to turn up, and I can start fiddling in earnest.