A Few Upgrades

A few updates to MediaServer8 this weekend. I replaced my 250GB cache drive with a Crucial Crucial 240GB M500 SATA 6Gb/s 2.5 Inch Internal Solid State Drive. My unRAID cache houses mainly Xen VMs and these have become noticeably faster to boot and peppier overall. On some internal transfers from unRAID to the drive, I see speeds of 150 Mb/s which is a big improvement on the spinner previously doing cache duties.

I also added an extra DVB S2 dual tuner to the system meaning I now have 6x tuners (4x DVD S2, 2x DVB-T) which is more than enough to service current live TV and PVR requirements.

6x Tuners in ArgusTV running in Windows 7 VM on MediaServer 8

Also, my X10 CM15A USB interface arrived so I can now control various lights and appliances around the house from a VM. My Christmas project is to set up a web server and application  to allow lighting and whole house audio control from tablet and laptop clients.