SSD drive recommendations / experiences

[tvmaster2]

thinking of going SSD with my SageTV server boot/system drive.

thinking 60gb should be enough for Win 7 (opinions welcome)

any recommendations, advice or experiences from different brands, etc?

Is there an SSD thread here that I haven't been able to find, if so, link to that would be helpful too.

thanks as always

[BobPhoenix]

Sorry too lazy to find the link for you.

I have/had 3 SageTV servers running on 40GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSDs - smallest I would recommend. 2 are headless and show 2/3 full all the time other was also used for viewing and ran out of space before I upgraded. 60GB should be fine but I went with 80GB because it was the only one I could get locally when I upgraded. Was a better SSD anyway as it was Intel (more good ratings on Newegg). Although I have never had a problem with my OCZs.

[jlmdxtv]

I use an older 60GB Kingston SSD with Windows 8 on my SageTV server.

I don't have more than 20GB in use, but i wouldn't mind a bigger device so that over time it could spread the writes over a larger area and help the SSD last longer (in theory), since the SSD can only write to the same cells some fixed number of times (whatever that is).

I also use SysInternal's FileMon to see what's being written (i.e. what's causing the writes) to the SSD to help me reduce the writes to the minimum, as well as follow other optimizing techniques found on the web for keeping the SSDs lasting longer.

john

[IVB]

this is the link for the SageTV thread, experience seems positive.

CQC'ers definitely worse experiences.

[tvmaster2]

thanks for the help folks, and the thread

[davephan]

I bought a Crucial RealSSD C300 CTFDDAC128MAG-1G1 2.5" 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive for my general purpose computer. I haven't bought one for the SageTV computer yet.

I think 60 gigs is a bit small. It would be better to us a 128 gig so you don't have to worry about running out of space on the operating system/programs drive. Boot times are drastically faster than the old mechanical drives. Program open much faster. I heard that the SageTV extender response times are faster with the SSD instead of a mechanical drive. I purchased the drive February 2011 and it has been running perfectly since. When shopping for SSDs, read the reviews about response time. Some SSDs are very slow compared to other SSDs.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148348


Dave

[IVB]

On that note, for those of you using your server to perform multi-duty, DavePhan is totally on mark, size matters. I use my server for SageTV, Picasa, CQC, DropBox, GoogleDrive, SqueezeCenter, and a few other things i'm blanking on. Picasa alone has a tendency to explode the db size, and its only usable on drive C.

64GB might be "good enough", but given that my read of various people's experiences show that SSD would be iffy, i'll go with a rotational HD but setup a 120GB drive C partition.

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by IVB

On that note, for those of you using your server to perform multi-duty, DavePhan is totally on mark, size matters. I use my server for SageTV, Picasa, CQC, DropBox, GoogleDrive, SqueezeCenter, and a few other things i'm blanking on. Picasa alone has a tendency to explode the db size, and its only usable on drive C.

64GB might be "good enough", but given that my read of various people's experiences show that SSD would be iffy, i'll go with a rotational HD but setup a 120GB drive C partition.

If you are running Windows Vista or newer, you can use NTFS symbolic link. I use this on my current windows box to move the entire "Users" ("User"?) directory to my HD, from my SSD. This is the directory most written to (other than temp), and as my SSDs are 1st gen, it really extends their life.

[simonen]

The only thing I gained was a faster boot time, everything else remained the same including experience with the extenders.

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by simonen

The only thing I gained was a faster boot time, everything else remained the same including experience with the extenders.

As Fuzzy pointed out, nothing is faster than RAM, consider a RamDisk and please have a look at this thread here. It did help improving the user experience with extenders.

Eddy

[IVB]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

If you are running Windows Vista or newer, you can use NTFS symbolic link. I use this on my current windows box to move the entire "Users" ("User"?) directory to my HD, from my SSD. This is the directory most written to (other than temp), and as my SSDs are 1st gen, it really extends their life.

yeah, unfortunately one box runs WHS v1 and the other is XP.

May be time to finally upgrade one of them. But if I do that, I may as well create the boot partition to 200GB eliminating the need for symbolic links :-)

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by IVB

yeah, unfortunately one box runs WHS v1 and the other is XP.

If you don't need to link to network shares (which according to what you posted I believe you don't) you can use NTFS junction point which are basically the same thing as NTFS symbolic link and available since Windows 2000.

My thread about way to increase browsing speed with fanart talks about NTFS junction point and explain how to use it.

Eddy

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by routerunner

... NTFS junction point which are basically the same thing as NTFS symbolic link...

Anyone know the "real" difference between the two? On XP are they invisible to everything also??? (so I could move a system directory this way, and ALL programs would honor it?)

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

Anyone know the "real" difference between the two? On XP are they invisible to everything also??? (so I could move a system directory this way, and ALL programs would honor it?)

By invisible you mean "transparent" to ALL programs? Yes, they will honour it, is the OS than hides everything.

Please have a look here for a detailed explanation.

Eddy

[mtpudelko]

Originally Posted by davephan

I bought a Crucial RealSSD C300 CTFDDAC128MAG-1G1 2.5" 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive for my general purpose computer. I haven't bought one for the SageTV computer yet.

I think 60 gigs is a bit small. It would be better to us a 128 gig so you don't have to worry about running out of space on the operating system/programs drive. Boot times are drastically faster than the old mechanical drives. Program open much faster. I heard that the SageTV extender response times are faster with the SSD instead of a mechanical drive. I purchased the drive February 2011 and it has been running perfectly since. When shopping for SSDs, read the reviews about response time. Some SSDs are very slow compared to other SSDs.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148348


Dave

Same here. 128GB is kind of a sweet spot for me as well. I've had a 256GB C300 from about 18 months for my main development machine; the more I watched my STV box take forever to boot, the more I hated it. I finally caved and put a Crucial M4 128 in that thing in January and haven't looked back, it boots in about 20 secs and is noticeably more responsive in the UI. If you really get into major geek mode and compare, the M4's benchmark faster, but in practice, I sure can't notice any difference between the older C300 and M4's. Regardless of model, after swapping an SSD into just about all of mine, I would never go back to a non-SSD for a system boot drive.

Now's a great time to consider an SSD. The past two weeks or so seems like the beginning of an all-out SSD price war. I picked up another 128GB M4 for $110 shipped on buy.com this past week for a laptop, about 40% below the same drive cost in Jan. Today Amazon had a 256GB M4 for $205 for a very short time. It looks like under $1/GB is quickly becoming the new norm.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by simonen

The only thing I gained was a faster boot time, everything else remained the same including experience with the extenders.

I didn't do a scientific experiment but I swear that my extenders are more responsive since I switched to a SSD. Boot time is way faster but that doesn't matter too much as I generally go weeks between boots.