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Re: ION "LE" suitable for FE/ slave BE?

 

 

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pubear at u

Nov 10, 2009, 11:22 AM

Post #1 of 2 (370 views)
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Re: ION "LE" suitable for FE/ slave BE?

On 11/10/09 9:29 AM, "Johnny" <jarpublic [at] gmail> wrote:

>> What is it that makes something "a great Myth FE box", as opposed to "
>> greate Myth FE/BE box"?
>>
>
> The frontend priorities are usually, HD playback, small, quiet, etc.
> The backend priorities are usually disk space, disk I/O, CPU/RAM
> (transcoding, comm-flagging, database). The recently released nvidia
> ION systems tend to meet the priorites of a FE better than what we
> have had in the past and they hit a better price point. Having
> hardware accelerated video with VDPAU means the system can use a low
> heat, low power CPU (Intel Atom). So the whole system can be very
> small and quiet and still playback HD H264 material. However being
> very small and having a less powerful CPU doesn't tend to be ideal for
> a BE, but some make it work in very simple setups.

I have a question regarding these Atom/IONs.

I have a decent fe/be, and won't be changing it anytime soon ($$ and WAF).

What I was considering was trying to buy an ION, perhaps one of the Revos,
or one based on the Zotac ION-ITX-F that has a PCI-e slot (if I can find a
mini-ITX case that has an expansion slot), and put a tuner in it as a slave
frontend. I am not entirely clear what extra services need to run on the
slave backend, if the master backend is hosting the database and storage.
Seems that for another few dollars, it would be great to be able to add an
extra tuner, and I have a cable drop already in the bedroom.

Any clue as to whether they would stand up to a slave backend load?

Thanks

Jim

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beww at beww

Nov 10, 2009, 4:43 PM

Post #2 of 2 (351 views)
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Re: ION "LE" suitable for FE/ slave BE? [In reply to]

On Tuesday 10 November 2009 12:22:38 James D. Goddard wrote:
> On 11/10/09 9:29 AM, "Johnny" <jarpublic [at] gmail> wrote:
> >> What is it that makes something "a great Myth FE box", as opposed to "
> >> greate Myth FE/BE box"?
> >
> > The frontend priorities are usually, HD playback, small, quiet, etc.
> > The backend priorities are usually disk space, disk I/O, CPU/RAM
> > (transcoding, comm-flagging, database). The recently released nvidia
> > ION systems tend to meet the priorites of a FE better than what we
> > have had in the past and they hit a better price point. Having
> > hardware accelerated video with VDPAU means the system can use a low
> > heat, low power CPU (Intel Atom). So the whole system can be very
> > small and quiet and still playback HD H264 material. However being
> > very small and having a less powerful CPU doesn't tend to be ideal for
> > a BE, but some make it work in very simple setups.
>
> I have a question regarding these Atom/IONs.
>
> I have a decent fe/be, and won't be changing it anytime soon ($$ and WAF).
>
> What I was considering was trying to buy an ION, perhaps one of the Revos,
> or one based on the Zotac ION-ITX-F that has a PCI-e slot (if I can find a
> mini-ITX case that has an expansion slot), and put a tuner in it as a slave
> frontend. I am not entirely clear what extra services need to run on the
> slave backend, if the master backend is hosting the database and storage.
> Seems that for another few dollars, it would be great to be able to add an
> extra tuner, and I have a cable drop already in the bedroom.
>
> Any clue as to whether they would stand up to a slave backend load?

Probably, if you didn't push it too hard. The Revo has a 2.5" 5400 RPM drive,
so if you want a lot of disk I/O you might want to use the eSATA port to add
another drive.

I'm curious why you can't just put the extra tuner into your present fe/be,
and use a Revo-like device as a f/e only.

As has been said, the ION machines are great as F/Es, and can operate as fe/be
combos in very simple systems, so it should be able to operate as a slave
b/e, especially if only one stream has to be read or written to disk at a
time, and no significant transcode or commflag load is put on it.

--
Brian Wood
beww [at] beww
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