[mythtv-users] SSDs and Myth frontends ?

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Fri Sep 17 15:04:18 UTC 2010


On Friday, September 17, 2010 08:41:14 am Ian Oliver wrote:
> In article <201009161822.15829.beww at beww.org>, Brian Wood wrote:
> > But I have read a few things about the net about SSDs causing long
> > pauses, but of course these were Windows users
> 
> Windows likes doing lots and lots and lots of writes. OK, so it also
> does lots and lots of reads, but it's the writes that slower (cheaper)
> MLC SSDs don't like.
> 
> Linux is really happy on SSD as long as you use the noatime mount
> option that you obviously know about already. I boot all my mythtv
> front ends off HD but used to have a geexbox machine and it booted in
> about 30 seconds from a very cheap CF card.

I'm booting my Revo FE now with a SATA-to-CF adapter, using a Hitachi MicroDrive (CF form factor, but spinning media). 
It's only 4GB, enough to get a FE up and running, bot not enough space for much else.

I guess I should just install the SSD and see what happens, or just try a bigger solid-state CF card.

I have an NSLU2 running Debian Sarge from a USB flash drive that I intentionally mounted without the noatime parameter, 
it's been running close to 3 years 24/7 with no sign of any degradation. I suspect the "wear out" problem with flash has 
been overstated. Of course now that I have said that, it will probably die today.

I keep seeing posts on the net that confirm that Firefox is the bugaboo with SSDs and Linux, perhaps this is because it's 
the most common very disk-intensive app that people generally run? Or is FF really doing something so different from 
everything else that it exposes problems that other apps don't?

Even given the fact that SSDs aren't so great at write performance, they should be at least as good as spinning drives, I 
would have thought.

Or maybe the fact that it has to write a page at a time makes the write requirements much higher? I'd think that more RAM 
(for disk cache) would solve that, but it doesn't seem to make that much difference.










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