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

R. G. Newbury newbury at mandamus.org
Thu Jul 29 21:25:07 UTC 2010


On 07/28/2010 11:30 PM, Daniel Kristjansson wrote:
> 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.

Random writes are the Achilles heel of SSD's. But check out the Manager 
Flash Technology at http://www.easyco.com

They have drivers for USB/CF/SSD which speed things up INCREDIBLY. The 
technology is explained on the site. The driver changes random writes to 
linear writes by re-writing a larger block of data. It is not 
particularly cheap but it will do the trick.
And the numbers are INCREDIBLE.

Geoff

Full Disclosure: I have no interest in this company, although I have 
talked to one of the principals.



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