[mythtv-users] SSDs and Myth frontends ?

Dave Richardson mythtv at derdev.com
Fri Sep 17 12:58:14 UTC 2010


On Thu, 16 Sep 2010 18:22:15 -0600, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
> Someone just gave me a 64GB SSD (probably buttering me up for some other
> favor in the future, like building him a Myth 
> system).
> 
> I was thinking about replacing the 2.5" HDD that came with my Revo with
it.
> 
> I don't really see any advantage, other than power consumption, heat and
> reliability.
> 
> But I have read a few things about the net about SSDs causing long
pauses,
> but of course these were Windows users, and I 
> know Windows is not optimized for SSDs, and there are some parameters
you
> can tweak in Linux to handle them better (like 
> which scheduler, mounting with noatime, not swapping to it etc.).
> 
> Anybody see any reasons to not go with an SSD for a frontend? As I said,
> I'm not looking for any great improvement over a 
> conventional SSD, but my other option is to netboot the frontend, which
> would be even quieter, draw even less power and 
> make even less heat than an SSD.
> 
> Hmmm, seems like I am talking myself into netbooting :-)
> 
> Although 64Gb is large enough to hold an OS and a Myth B/E, I don't see
> any reason to try the SSD in my BE, it's already 
> spinning many drives anyway, and is located in the garage so noise is
not
> a factor.
> 
> If it matters, it's a (relatively) cheap Kingston unit, I've seen them
> around for $120. I know Linus says to not buy 
> anything but an Intel SSD, but he probably has more money than I do, and
> may get hardware for free.
> 

I've built a couple dedicated FEs using 32GB SSDs.  I've noticed some
lagginess when using Firefox, but apt updates seem to work very quickly. 
Not sure if there's correlation in the disk IO between those or not.  I
have been very pleased with Myth FE performance using SSD.





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