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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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.