[mythtv-users] SSDs and Myth frontends ?

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Fri Sep 17 14:40:03 UTC 2010


On Friday, September 17, 2010 07:22:17 am Eric Sharkey wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 9:10 AM, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
> > This is why I am leery of using an SSD for Myth, I don't need something
> > that often stalls the system for long periods.
> 
> I have 32GB SSDs in my backend and one frontend and have never
> experienced such a problem.  The other thing that feels a lot faster
> within myth are any operations that hit mysql pretty hard (searching
> for new recordings to schedule and stuff).  I couldn't recommend it
> more.
> 
> On the other hand, not all SSDs are created equal.  I certainly had to
> pay more than $0 for mine.

That's the truth. Except for capacity, the makers/sellers seem to supply almost no information, certainly not about wear 
leveling, expected write cycles, and even true speed. Many of them just supply the SATA2 speed, which of course we already 
know, and all we know for certain is the actual device speeds will be slower.

The same is true for USB flash devices, all they will tell you is the capacity, nothing about actual performance. Some are 
marked "high speed" or "perfect for video", which is useless information and means nothing.

The only really useful info I have found is Linus's advice (buy Intel), and the obvious "you get what you pay for" adage.

Of course I can't complain, having paid nothing, but I wish the makers supplied more information.

The prices are getting low enough that I might purchase some units, but I want to find out if power, noise and boot speed 
are the only advantages.

Database read speed is only useful in a BE, but an all solid-state FE would seem to be a good thing, but is it any better 
than simply net booting the FE? which would be even better at heat, noise and power, but not at boot speed, but I tend to 
run a FE 24/7, so boot speed doesn't really matter.


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