TiVo Community Forums Archives - To swap or NOT to swap?

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To swap or NOT to swap?
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Posted by: DCIFRTHS

What is the current thought on the size of the swap file for a 300 GB (one disk) Pioneer 57H TiVo?

Posted by: pahunt

Robert S quotes a figure of 1/2000th of the total capacity so that would work out at about 150MB for a 300GB disk.

Posted by: Ego

On that same note, in my personal opinion, you can never have too much swap space, and if you can spare it, more is of course better than worse. With a 300gig drive, I'd even go as high as 300-400mb, which is still a small fraction of your total size..

Posted by: Robert S

The 1/2000 figure is already conservative (1/2048 would be closer). However, as it's difficult-to-impossible to increase swap when you add a B drive, you need 1/2000th of the maximum storage you intend to install, not just the current capacity.

As fitting a second drive to a DVD/TiVo seems to be problematic at best, this may not be a consideration in this case.

Posted by: DCIFRTHS

quote:
Originally posted by Robert S
The 1/2000 figure is already conservative (1/2048 would be closer). However, as it's difficult-to-impossible to increase swap when you add a B drive, you need 1/2000th of the maximum storage you intend to install, not just the current capacity.

As fitting a second drive to a DVD/TiVo seems to be problematic at best, this may not be a consideration in this case.

Correct. I am just replacing the A drive with a new 300GB one. The issue, is HOW TO create the swap on this drive. All that I have read, in the past, and recently, leads me to believe that there is no way to add a large swap file to my 57H. If I am worng, and I hope I am, please help me out becasue I can't figure out how to do it.

Posted by: Robert S

When you run MFS Tools, use -s 150 (or whatever figure you feel appropriate). MFS Tools will then create a 150Mb partition for your swap. Unfortunately MFS Tools can not initialise swap partitions larger than 127Mb, so at this point you have a hole in your partition layout and no swap at all.

You have to initialise the swap partition yourself. This used to be a pain, but Todd Miller wrote a utility called tpip which makes it very easy. I haven't been following the Series 2 large drive upgrade scene very closely, but hopefully that's enough to get you going.

There's the 160Gb sticky in the Underground and a non-stick thread on upgrading DVD/TiVoes in here: http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-v...threadid=144173

Posted by: DCIFRTHS

Robert, Thanks for the info Okay. After reading a lot of documentation, here is what I have deciphered.

After restoring a Pioneer 57H image to a 300GB drive using mfstools and the -s 150 option, I need to run tpip with the argument listed below:

tpip -mkswap -s /dev/hdx (where x is the location of the HD with the large swap file on it.

I am under the inpression that this will initialize the large swap file created by mfstools. I got this information from this page under the options section.

1) Is the information above correct?
2) Your recommendation for size of a swap file on a single disk 300 GB Series 2 Pioneer id 150. Correct?
3) Would there be any negatives to enlarging it to 200 just to be on the safe side?

Thanks

Posted by: Robert S

Yes, thats sounds right, although I seem to recall something about tpip not working right on the Pioneers in Lou's thread, so you might want to check that thread to be sure that that's the correct method for initialising the swap.

150Mb is already slightly conservative, there's no reason to add more for 'safety'. There's no way to upgrade the A drive again - if you wanted a 400Gb A drive (I assume such things will appear in future), you'd have to start from a backup and would therefore recreate the swap partition anyway. I understand there's no way to fit a B drive to a DVD/TiVo because the case is already full.

There are Series 1 TiVoes running with 300Mb of swap for 600Gb of disk space with no reported problem.

Posted by: DCIFRTHS

Thanks Robert.