Does TVHeadend mean lots of writes to SD Card, when installed on an ARM device.

elsmandino · January 14, 2019 at 4:57 PM

I would be really grateful to know how well, TVHeadend works on something like a Raspberry Pi.

I note that lots of people are adding a usb hard drive for recordings.

However, does TVHeadend mean lots of writing to the SD Card, every time there is an EPG or Schedule update?

I cannot tell whether TVHeadend run in RAM, only, and only writes to disk before closing down.

**Iridium** · January 14, 2019 at 5:44 PM Official Post

I've been running TVH on a RPi3 for ages and I haven't seen any significant I/O on the SD card. Depending on your DVB adapter USB/SPI you may not be able to record HD due to USB conflicts and speed of USB drives.

Personally, I run a RPi3 booting off of a 240GB SSD via a USB caddy with a Raspberry Pi DVB hat (SPI) and I can run 3 HD recordings simultaneously (All on the same MUX) with only a few errors.

Generally the RPi2/3 is fine for TVH but you may need to tweak the H/W depending on you recording requirements.

elsmandino · January 15, 2019 at 9:22 AM

Thanks for that, Iridium.

Clever idea about booting off and storing recordings on the same SSD - is there any reason you decided not to run everything off the SD card directly?

**Iridium** · January 15, 2019 at 9:30 AM Official Post

Basically ease of backup. Also a HD recording is about 2G so there is not a lot of room (even on a 64GB SD card) for many recordings. Generally, booting LE off a SD card and having a SSD/HDD for recordings is the way to go.

The downside of a separate SSD/HDD is you'll need a separate powered USB HUB.

elsmandino · January 15, 2019 at 9:36 AM

My apologies - I think I misread your earlier post.

So you you use the SSD purely for recordings - i.e. all you system files are on the SD Card?

**Iridium** · January 15, 2019 at 5:26 PM Official Post

No I use the SSD for booting and storage (No SD card is needed). This does however create a backup of 240GB but a restore is only minutes. I use cloud storage to backup changed files.

Most people boot from SD and store recordings on SSD/HDD.

The other alternative is to have LE on the SD card but have /storage and recordings on a SSD/HDD. This means all I/O is on the SSD/HDD.

If I was you, I'd keep things simple and first *try* LE and TVH and see how you get on - you can always change things later.

elsmandino · January 16, 2019 at 12:37 PM

Really interesting.

I was struggling to understand how you were avoiding the use of a SD card and have only just realised that a Raspberry Pi 3 can boot directly from USB.

I cannot believe that I did not know this, considering I have had a RPi3 for ages!

Thanks for the advice - much appreciated.