[mythtv-users] SSD's

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Fri Oct 2 23:21:08 UTC 2009


On Friday 02 October 2009 17:05:40 David Scammell wrote:
> Hi,
>
> More of a thinking out loud comment than anything else but the price
> of SSD disks are dropping, a 60GB disk can be bought in the UK for
> ~£100, having had a pair (of bigger) disks to play with at work I was
> impressed with their:
>
> speed: 80MB/s (from memory)
> power/heat consumption: 1w (a guess) but very low, they get barely warm.
> size: 2.5in
> performance: no seek time at all.
>
> I was thinking about, when the price comes down a teeny bit more for
> one for fronting the the MBE storage. I;m thinking that this disk
> would be chosen for new recordings ahead of any other storage grouped
> disks provided it was most empty, which can be done in off periods,
> after an evening recordings have finished by moving the recordings to
> the other disks. The point is that during busy periods, recordings or
> comm flagging the io to the disk would cope much better than
> conventional disks as there is no delay due to seek time. Running a
> fileserver benchmark at work showed a stunning throughput compared to
> normal disk, down to no seek time. Having multiple recordings going to
> disk at the same time (say multirec) shouldn't bandwidth limited, also
> the machine OS/mysql could live on the same disk. Obviously those big
> raid volumes that some users have could be spun down more frequently.
>
> Thoughts?

It's a mathematical question, how much is the power and time savings worth to 
you?

I suspect that right now the advantages of the SSDs are not worth the cost, 
though I think they will be in the near future.

We may also see the prices of conventional HDDs drop as the competition from 
the SSDs becomes more of a factor, and this will have to be factored into the 
equation as well.

Also, we don't yet have really good data on the long-term performance of SSDs.

So the result is first, we don't have sufficient data to make a decision, when 
we do, it will be a standard cost/benefit analysis.

Right now SSDs will not permit my Myth system to do anything it can't do now, 
though they might reduce my power consumption. My current HDDs are fast 
enough, so the speed issue is not important to me.

-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org


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