One other FWIW - SSD's and XP and SageTV Servers

[Savage1701]

One other thought - I've just spent a couple of weeks going back and forth with the enlightened on the OCZ SSD forum. I have been trying to align an SSD with XP (32 or 64) without success on any Asus board. I can align it but XP won't install. Or, I can accept a bad alignment and get XP to install.

After putting up with a fair amount of bunk, one of the enlightened over their reproduced the issue and was immediately baffled. Alignment is not nearly as big a deal with mechanical drives, but matters enormously for SSD's.

It's tempting to use an SSD on a video server since one typically may only run the OS and the SageTV app. I can get an XP install with Sage and some basic utilities and backup software at about 9GB, so an SSD is a viable option in this case.

XP wants a default offset of 63 for its hard drives. In theory it should not care if you change that to 64 or 128 or some of the other SSD-optimized offsets, but many of the MB's out there will return an "Error Loading Operating System" if you try to install at an SSD-optimized alignment. Some don't. My SuperMicro board accepts any alignment. None of my 4 Asus boards will, even after cold cmos resets and disabling of all controllers except the ICH10R and just the SSD and the optical. This probably is also due to BIOS issues on the MB's as well.

Just another thing to keep in mind when setting up a server. I think the boot speed and system speed of my setup is compromised rather severly by this situation, but I don't have several hundred to replace a brand new Asus with a similar Supermicro.

[Fuzzy]

Boot speed MIGHt be slightly impacted, but probably not by much. Once you get up to SSD speeds (even misaligned), boot-up ends up being process limited. I've built systems booting from slower USB Thumbdrives, or CF cards that boot in incredibly quick times. All that said, if done right, sage will only need to boot up once, so boot speed doesn't really matter here.

As for system speed, I doubt you will see any difference. There really is little to no disk activity for sage, other than the recording/playback itself, which isn't on the SSD anyways.

Finally, I'd point out that, really, you aren't going to gain much from going to an SSD over just a cheap thumbdrive or cf card.

[stanger89]

You might be able to make a case for improved performance (really reduced issues) recording to an SSD, but I agree, other than reading and writing media files, which aren't on your OS drive, Sage really doesn't do much with the disk.

[Savage1701]

Good points indeed. I was more thinking during the configuration phase where one might be doing multiple reboots and such, but you are right. Once my server is on, it's on. Just trying to point out too that alignment issues are frequently present in XP/SSD setups. I have a Supermicro board that allows any offset. It is noticeably faster and utterly without stutter. I know a lot of people want to build these things into tiny ITX/Micro ATX HTPC enclosures and such. At that point an SSD become very tempting.

Take care.