I'm about to pick a hard drive and from what I've read, the seagate 7200.7 are quiet and reliable. The two I am looking at are $85 and $130 CAD for 80GB w/2mb Cache and a 120GB with 8mb cache. I am not too concerned about the size because I hear I'll get about a half hour per gig (or is that an hour...I forget...either way, I'm fine for the amount of recording I think I'll be doing). Should I shell out the extra coin for the extra cache? Will I want more the added hard drive space regardless of what I think now?

The amount of space used depends strongly on your encoding, which in turn may depend on the type of capture card you're using. With a Hauppauge PVR 250 or 350 the built in mpeg-2 produces ~2.2Gb/Hour. The default partitiioning on an 80Gb drive leaves you with 65Gb for all data storage which means ~30 hours worth of programming even with ZERO music or other data. This will become a limitation far faster than you might think. You can transcode to reduce the size, but will have to decide what what you think is an acceptable level of quality.

I startted out withan 80Gb disk and the idea that I could archive anything I wanted to keep longer on DVD and quickly discover it just wasn't enough space. I added a 200Gb Seagate HD (they're also one of the coolest running drives ) which is mounted on /myth/tv, and usage on that partition has been hovering between 55-65% with occasional surges above 75%.

The cache will have a relatively minor effect on performance if the OS is doing it's buffering well (Check out recent HD performance tests on AnandTech and the like), but definitely get the bigger disk for the extra space...

Hmmm....I guess I was kidding myself. Thanks for the thorough reply. I think I'll go for the larger drive...

I will have to agree with tjc, buy the largest drive you can afford. I started with a smaller drive and I filled it in no time. I now have a 200 gig drive and I can fill that pretty easily now too. I have the tendency to record things that I am slightly interested in and before I know it my drive is almost full and I don't have time to watch all the recordings. So now I am trying to get into the habit of recording only shows that I really want to watch or else I can't keep up. Also my music collection keeps on growing and that eats at the space too.

Thanks chopsuey. I purchased the 120GB drive, on tjc's advice. That's about all I could shell out at the moment. Maybe someday I'll have to add a second drive, but that may be a bit above my confidence level w/ linux. I don't think it's the easiest thing to get working with knoppmyth, although I may be wrong on that...anyone tried it?

I did say "added" not "replaced".

Adding a disk under Linux isn't much harder than under any other OS. All you really need to do is format it and mount it. I'm pretty sure there's a walk through for doing it in one of the forums here.

This may be a little late, but I posted a link for a 160GB Maxtor Ultra drive for $99 at staples.com

And Office Depot has a spankin' Maxtor 7200rpm 250GB w/8MB cache for $159 no rebate... I got one a couple weeks ago when they ran the same deal.

The deal's probably only good until Saturday night (I'm guessing).

And Staples had or still has a deal on the 200Gb Maxtor for $140 ($0.70/Gb).

If you're shopping for drives or other hardware and can wait for a few weeks Hot Deals Club will usually turn up a decent price. This is how I found the 200Gb Seagate at $99.99 ($0.50/Gb) after rebate.