If I do that, will it record to both drives?
Say I have a 1 TB drive half full
I add a second 1 TB drive.
I go into setup and tell WMC to record to the new drive, will it fill up the old drive and also fill up the new drive?
Or will it ignore the old drive?
Anyway to get to use both for recording live tv?
WMC supports one single "\Recorded TV" folder for recording purposes. It can be as large as you want, but just one.
Once recorded, you can move the WTV file to any other "\Recorded TV" folder on any other drive, as defined by your "Media Libraries" setup. So you can have multiple of these "playback-only" folders on multiple drives, but obviously limited to one such folder per drive.
Other TV products (e.g. BeyondTV) support defining "pools of recording folders", but these are not free nor do they support cablecard tuners (if that was an issue... which isn't in your case). Of course if it was important (as it would be if you wanted to record non-HD content from DirectTV/Dish tuners) BeyondTV also supports S-video input (as channel 0) on supported TV tuner cards, which WMC does not for the same TV tuner card.
I have found a free program for WMC that looks to me like it can do it all that I would want.
IF I can figure it all out.
Including recording across the LAN to another PC directly.
WMC Recording Storage Pooler
storage pooler joins drives.Recording using a network drive
In order to work with a network drive (either a network path mapped as a drive, or a UNC path), you will need to change the WMC Recording Storage Pooler service to run under a user account with write permissions to the network share. You will also need to change the user for the WMC Receiver Service to set the proper permissions for WMC to record to the network drive.
Make sure you have an administrator account that exists on both your WMC PC and the network computer with the same user name and password on both computers. For a network with a domain, it will need to be domain account. If this account doesn’t exist, create it.
Change the account that runs the WMC Recording Storage Pooler service (WMCRecordingStoragePooler) to the administrator account.
Change the account that runs the Windows Media Center Receiver Service (ehRecvr) to the administrator account.
WMC Recording Storage Pooler creates a drive pool out of multiple storage drives to use for Recorded TV in Windows Media Center. WMC Recording Storage Pooler can create a drive pool out of local or network drives.
What is does
Based on a time interval you decide, the software checks a list of drives you provide and sets the drive with the most available free space to be the Recording Storage location. Any new recordings will be saved to the new drive location, while any current recordings will finish at the old location. When another drive has more available free space, it will become the new Recording Storage drive.
WMC Recording Storage Pooler will create a storage pool from any number of drives, and can change the Recording Storage location at any frequency of 1 or more minutes.
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