[mythtv-users] Opinions on Solid State Drives for Myth ???

[Daniel Kristjansson]

On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 10:40 -0600, Brian Wood wrote:
> I'm seeing 40GB SSDs for around $100.
> 
> 40GB is enough for an OS and Myth itself (not video storage).
> 
> The consensus seems to be that the OS and Myth should be on a separate spindle from the video storage, which makes sense.
> 
> So the question is, would using a 40GB SSD for the OS and Myth result in any improvements in performance (or anything 
> else) that would justify the $100, or would putting that $100 into additional RAM be a better way to go?

The quick answer is...put the money into a small 7200 rpm drive
for the boot/db disk for the best performance. If noise is a concern
a second 5000 rpm drive for the boot/db disk would be a better
option than an SSD.

I've found that SSD drives are highly variable in their write speeds.
This is especially true of random writes where I've seen wall clock
times of 500ms to write 1 byte to disk, or to put it in perspective
enough time for the CPUs to retire 36 billion instructions. The
manufacturer stats are always for throughput of streaming writes to
factory fresh disk, which isn't exactly reflective of real world use.
So you need to read reviews of the particular model of disk you are
interested in on anandtech or similar; you really can't go wrong with
the Intel SSD drives, but there are some other drives that are better
value for most users.

-- Daniel