[mythtv-users] SSD disk for DB

[Ronald Frazier]

On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 10:29 AM, Mike Perkins
<mikep at randomtraveller.org.uk> wrote:

> I would make the distinction here between a Flash disk and a Solid State
> Disk (SSD).

Good catch. For some reason I read it as 80GB (a common size for SSDs).

>What you have said above is true for Flash disks like SDHC,
> Compact Flash, etc but is not true for SSDs. These can be treated just like
> a normal hard disk.

Not entire true. They are still subject to wear out, but due to wear
leveling you are talking about sectors going bad in years, rather than
flash drives, where in the pathological case you could see sectors
failing in just days. That said, you still do have to take some steps
to get the best life out of the drive.

Anything that writes lots of data on a regular basis would be better
done on a HDD. While things like video recording would be the obvious
case, you likely wouldn't even think to try that due to the limited
capacity. But as I mentioned in my previous post, the mysql temporary
tables generated by the myth scheduler can actually eat through the
rated life of the drive in just a few years.

Now I hear people say sometimes "well, in a couple years SSDs will be
faster and cheaper, so who cares". Well, in 3 or 4 years, I'll bet
that a 40GB SSD will still be more than plenty of space for a
dedicated mythtv system to run in. I'd also bet that the perceived
increase in performance would be negligible too. On my Win7 system, I
really don't perceive a difference between my 3rd gen Intel SSD and
the 1st gen that I bought 3 years before that. So my thinking is, in
3-4 years, unless you enjoy throwing money away you probably wouldn't
have a compelling reason to replace your working SSD in your myth
system. So I think it's well worth it to try and make the drive last
as long as possible since it takes minimal effort.

-- 
Ron Frazier