[mythtv-users] An SSD for Backend OS / Database Drives?

[Andre]

On 15 Mar 2012, at 03:13, Douglas Peale wrote:

> On 2012/03/14 02:29 PM, tortise wrote:
>> My Server's OS/Database HDD is possibly showing signs of aging being an 
>> older and noisier 7200 120G that's got a few bad sectors reallocated.
>> 
>> Having found SSD on frontends give a significant user speed upgrade 
>> (faster on/off and faster menu responses) I am now considering replacing 
>> the backend OS drive with an SSD. (Also 3 x 2TB drives for recordings 
>> seem happy there)
>> 
>> Some of the new 6G series 3 SSD's such as the Adata S510's seem a 
>> possible replacement, capable of 550/510MB read and write speeds.
>> 
>> My motherboard (Gigabyte GA-EP31-DS3L)is a SATA 2 which I understand to 
>> mean it can transfer 3Gb/s over the SATA interface.
>> 
>> There seems little point in spending extra on SDD's that run faster than 
>> the SATA II interface, unless there is no disadvantage...
>> 
>> The b and B's might be confused somewhere, however it seems the full 
>> 550/510MB read and writes may be available on the SATA II interface.
>> 
>> If one uses a SSD on a backend (no frontend use) then the only 
>> difference I expect I am going to see is faster mythweb page loads, 
>> which might be nice for the recordings page.  The frontend recordings 
>> lists might also populate quicker.  This basically assumes the database 
>> reads are read from the disc and not from RAM, my understanding is its 
>> done from the disc, if so there seems considerable scope for speeding up 
>> the user experience that relies on the myriad of reads?
>> 
>> Can anyone comment about this analysis, do you agree or see it 
>> differently?  I presume some people have now done this, what has been 
>> their experience?
>> 
>> 
>> 
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>> 
> I have been using a SSD as a boot disk for a while now.
> 
> Pros: I no longer have corrupted recordings due to the disk taking too long to respond (database was swamping the HDD)
> 
> Cons: Ubuntu does not boot reliably with a SSD. About one in 5 boots hangs dumping me into busybox, and I must type exit to
> continue the boot. This is a problem because I let my system shut down when idle.

Ah yes, forgot to mention this, in my defence I very rarely reboot. Ubuntu has some race problems on booting, I found that I needed to put all the recording drive mounts in to rc.local rather than fstab then it booted reliably, I also have to remember not to log in straight away or myth-backend won't be running yet as my tuner cards take a while to initialise.

Nice problem to have :-)

Andre