[mythtv-users] USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough?

[Travis Tabbal]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 8:30 AM, Richard Morton
<richard.e.morton at gmail.com>wrote:

> I would be interested in the following numbers; what is the
> comparative cold-boot duration of a decent usb stick, hard-disc and
> net-boot over fast and gig-ethernet?
>


I don't really have numbers as I've never timed it with anything more than
just watching it go. However, with a decent server to boot from, I find
netbooting faster than USB or local HDD. The server in my case is able to
saturate the gigabit link without much hassle, and small old HDDs we would
tend to use for these sorts of things just can't push data that fast. I was
using older EIDE disks. I decided it was more cost effective to put the fast
nice drives in a server and boot the systems from there so I wasn't wasting
a ton of space on the nice drives. Even the old 40GB drives I was using for
boot disks before were only using 5GB or so. It seemed wasteful to put
500GB+ drives in there.

Both of my frontends go from cold boot to MythFrontend in about 45sec I
would guess. I could cut that down some, but it's fast enough that it
doesn't bother me. I don't have much for services running on them, LIRC and
SSH are about it other than the basics that a Linux system always has. I
also use a lightweight window manager, the default one Mythbuntu uses, I
don't remember which one that is, but it's not Gnome or KDE.

I haven't ever done it with 100M ethernet, so I can't really comment on that
one. I would guess it would be slower than HDD, but not too bad overall.
I've seen gigabit switches for $20 or so, well worth the upgrade if your
cabling is at least CAT5, which I think you need for 100M anyway.
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