[mythtv-users] my experience with myth on a solid state drive

[Tom Hayward]

On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 12:15, Ronald Frazier <ron at ronfrazier.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 1:49 PM, Mark J. Small <msmall at eastlink.ca> wrote:
>> So, which filesystem would you recommend using with an SSD for a myth
>> boot/database drive?  I haven't really kept up.
>
> Again, that was another thing I read a lot about. People talking about
> various systems and why they are better or worse. A lot of people were
> talking about ext4 being bad because of (I think it was) the
> journaling and how that wears the drive out a lot too. Some people
> said go with ext3, others said ext4 with the journaling disabled. I
> just ignored all the fuss, used ext4 normally (I did NOT disable the
> journaling or otherwise optimize it) and it's been fine.

I'll jump in here... I too installed an SSD and saw a significant
increase in database performance. Recordings, Guide, and MythWeb are
all very quick now (before, I would sometimes wait up to 4
seconds--not prohibitively slow).

The special configuration I used can be summed up with my fstab:

/dev/sda    /               ext4    discard,noatime,errors=remount-ro 0       1
tmpfs    /tmp      tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=5G          0 0

"discard" enables TRIM in ext4, if you SSD supports it. I'm not
concerned about wear, but I've never used atime, so decided it
wouldn't hurt to disable. The big wear savings comes from mounting
/tmp in memory.

Tom