[mythtv-users] Recommendation for SSD boot drive

[dlknight2]

> I use a USB3 stick on a frontend... 8GB is big enough for a mythbuntu
> install. I have not measured it, but it's fast enough for my
> requirements, and it was the cheapest solid state solution I could 
> find.
>
> I was worried about booting from USB3, so instead of trying, I also 
> put
> a USB2 stick for /boot on that frontend, no harddisk.

I recently obtained an OCZ Onyx 32GB SATA-2 SSD for £20 (second user). 
My existing solution
was 2 x 2.5" 500GB 5400rpm SATA-2 drives with md-raid RAID-1 configured 
for root, boot and swap partitions.
I use an LVM stripe volume for my recordings which is split across both 
drives.

I have added the SSD to the existing md-raid setup, although I did 
stumble across a few issues. My existing partitions
were created quite some time ago so didn't have the luxury of beginning 
on the correct/default 1MB boundary. As I am
using GPT and currently Grub I also did not have a BIOS Boot partition. 
I had recently upgraded to Fedora 16 and this
shipped with Grub2. So I setup a BIOS Boot partition on the SSD on the 
1MB boundary, added the existing RAID partitions
and installed Grub2. I have left Grub installed on the existing 
rotating disks for now.

My start-up time is around 25 seconds (systemd --analyze) was 
originally approximately 50 seconds, some of this is down
to moving things from rc.local into systemd services however.

I followed several guides for improving SSD performance in Fedora (can 
provide links if necessary).

Further improvements I have planned are converting my ext3 partitions 
to ext4 to enable TRIM support.

I've also used a USB 2.0 SD reader and high speed 16GB SD card when I 
ran out of space compiling the kernel (that is
another story). It was remarkably fast and I did consider it for my 
boot / root partition. Also Linux (Fedora)
automatically mounted it for me without any intervention :)

Mythtv Frontend seems a fair bit more responsive on the SSD although I 
haven't really noticed any other improvements....


Yet!

Cheers

Dave K. (Long term Mythtv user - since 0.19)