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

Travis Tabbal travis at tabbal.net
Tue Jul 27 17:49:59 UTC 2010


On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 11:31 AM, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:

>
> I have wondered if the SSDs are actually better in any way than USB sticks
> (maybe better wear leveling or caching
> algorithm?) I also wonder if the Linux SATA drivers might be better than
> the stack that drives the USB sticks.
> Transferring large files to and from a USB stick on my desktop seems
> extremely slow, and uses a lot of CPU for some reason,
> but that's another issue.
>
>

It's related though. USB is CPU hungry, that's part of why it's so cheap
compared to FireWire and such. It's like a WinModem based bus. :) SATA has
some smarts built in to speed things up and not bog down the CPU as much.

That said, I've run an FE booted from a USB stick and it works fine. The
only reason I stopped is that I moved to netboot so that I could do more
than one from the same image. An FE only box doesn't really need much local
storage, and doesn't really write much outside of the logs. I used an 8GB
stick and had over 4GB free the entire time I ran that machine. :)

As for wearing it out, I ran that for about a year without issue and still
use that USB stick today for other stuff. And if it does die, it was a whole
$20 back then. Probably closer to $10 now.

For the OP, I don't see any reason to fuss with SSDs for Myth. They are
faster for seek times, but if you're not trying to share spindles you don't
need to worry about seeks so much. I can't think of anything that a Myth
BE/FE does that would really make a big difference with. Faster DB
transactions certainly, but enough to make a difference that you would even
notice? I don't know. Worth a try I guess if you want to, you could always
move the SSD to another box later if you don't see a worthwhile difference
in Myth.
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