Long story but I wound up with 11 tuners: 8 OTA tuners (4x HDHR3:US) and 3 cable tuners (one Prime). I was wondering if I will max-out a CPU or HDD write speed if I ever get all 11 tuners recording at the same time? I’m transitioning from Windows Media Center and often lost the last minute of a show, so I always started a recording a few minutes early and ended it a few minutes late. The drawback with this approach is that lots of tuners are required to handle back-to-back recording transitions (10 tuners are needed for a few minutes on each end to record 5 shows from 2pm to 3pm and then another 5 shows from 3pm to 4 pm).
I plan to use an early 2009 iMac with 2.66 Mhz i5-750 CPU (3707 Passmark benchmark). The HDD will be a WD 12GB Gold enterprise drive with Host to/from drive sustained speed of 255 MB/s (per spec sheet). I read a post from Tmm1 that each stream is “18mbps” (assuming those are b’s are Bytes instead of bits, then 11 tuners would require 198 MB/s write? So maybe it will work. The other question is whether a i5-730 CPU can drive the DVR. I have no plans to access the content from away from my network, so I am not thinking about transcoding. Thanks
18mbps is in bits. I think your setup would work just fine.