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pros/cons of dropping cable TV service

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ChadTower:

It wasn't listed in the thetvdb database or just didn't find the content fast enough for you?

Dervacumen:
I few weeks old, but I installed sickbeard today and so far it's working pretty well.  The biggest issue right now is there are few if any shows with new content during the summer so I won't know how well it's really going for a week or so when a few new episodes run.  Since DirecTV is fighting with Viacom and we lost Nickelodeon, I'm trying to convince my wife to finally get with the times.  I would gladly spend some of the money I save to get online sports packages that I would otherwise never purchase.

ChadTower:

So far Sickbeard/sabnzd has been pretty reliable for me.  I also put WDTV clients on each TV so I could start getting HD content. 

I have a 1TB single drive WD SAN that I have been using, but that's not really enough for HD, so I bought an external 1.5TB WD drive to add (the SAN can be expanded via USB).  I ran into a firmware limitation on the SAN where the external drive cannot be larger than the internal drive.  Crap.  So I pulled an older 640gb external drive I had around, moved all of that content (the arcade art library) to the 1.5TB drive, and expanded the SAN with the 640GB drive.  As soon as I added the external drive the SAN started to be extremely unstable and drops off the network frequently.  I'm trying to figure out why now.  That's where I am.

The WDTV clients are pretty good so far and where there have been issues it's hard to tell for sure if that's the SAN being stupid or the WDTV.

Dervacumen:
You have a SAN at home?  Huh.  Why wouldn't you just use NAS on your server?  Just wondering.
I have a single useful computer that is also my server for everything else in the house.  I don't know if I would ever get to the point where I might need a SAN.  At some point I might dedicate a server but I hate to keep adding to my power bill with a bunch of crap "that I can't do without".   We have a tiered structure here and the price per KW/H gets pretty high.

ChadTower:
The standalone NAS device consumes far less power.  They aren't subject to Windows or any other load on the hardware.  All they do is serve files.  I can turn off all of the PCs in the house and the WDTVs can still see their media source.  I don't have it fancy like an isolated subnet or anything.

Plus the main server is a beefy but older Dell Poweredge with XP and 2GB RAM.  If I used regular Windows sharing and local storage it would be far less stable.  This SAN is regularly accessed by 6 different clients (though rarely more than 4 at a time).  XP would start to choke out if someone were sitting at that machine browsing the web and 3 other machines started grabbing large files off a local disc.

I took the expansion drive off of the NAS and it went back to being totally stable.  The one downfall to this particular NAS device is crappy logging.  It's running linux so there has to be a way to enable SSH and look at the OS logs.  I just have to figure out how because it's a mostly closed system.

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