Should I use an SSD for live tv?

[dinki]

I'm back to using SageTV full time and we are watching a lot of live tv. Is it better for my hard drive to get an SSD to use for live tv? Is there a way to have Sage use an SSD for live tv but have it store recordings on a different drive?

[sic0048]

My comments are assuming you are recording to a storage drive that isn't your OS drive. While you will definitely see a overall speed improvement (not just with SageTV) if you have a SSID drive for your OS drive, I don't think you will see any benefit by recording to an SSID drive vs a regular drive. In other words, recording a stream or two isn't going to max out the write speed of a regular hard drive. Of course if you are trying to record a lot of concurrent recordings, it's possible you could max out the write speed. I think I've seen it sometimes on my system, but only when the cable card tuner is recording on all 6 tuners at the same time and not all the time either. I think it only happens when the bit rate is high on all the recordings for some reason.

[dinki]

I guess I could have been clearer with my concern. My main concern was the constant wear on the drive with all the writes and not so much the speed of the drive.

The plan is to use a portion of the SSD for the OS and the remainder for the SageTV recording directory for the Live TV watching and recordings. I'll then create a cron job to run nightly to move any recordings to the large data drive.

[Zogg]

That's what I was doing under Windows, spreading recordings over two SSD's, then moving them to the NAS overnight. The faster SSD's help playback startup and skipping around, as well as comskip tasks, go more quickly.

And with SSD drives being pretty inexpensive these days, even if you do wear one out more quickly, the cost amortized over time (say $50 for a 500GB SSD that wears out in 3 years) is 4.5 cents per day. Well worth the cost for an appliance you probably use every day. And I suspect it will last much longer than 3 years.

[peternm22]

I noticed there were a few TV companies including SSD's in their latest DVR's (Telus up here in Canada for instance), so if they think it's reliable enough, that's good enough for me.

I switched my recording drive to a 2 TB Crucial drive a year or two ago, and no problems yet.

In my experience the reliability of SSD's is pretty close to that of old school spinning drives at this point. I've had multiple spinning drives fail over the years, but I have yet to experience an SSD failure. I know failures can happen, but so far so good!

[KryptoNyte]

Originally Posted by peternm22

I've had multiple spinning drives fail over the years, but I have yet to experience an SSD failure.

I'm in the same boat, plenty of spinner failures, but never had an SSD failure since my first one in 2008. This isn't to say that the SSD drives haven't experienced cell loss, but nothing that compromised any files to my knowledge.

[dinki]

Unfortunately my last HDD failure was an SSD though it was the very first SSD I had ever purchased so I guess nothing last forever, right?

[nyplayer]

Recording isn't that write extensive you are Writing at the most an HD recording say 12 Gigabit long over an hour period it is not like you are writing 12 GIG in a few seconds like copying a file. Most of my recordings last night are at the most 4 GIG for a 1 hour show ... It does not take much bandwidth to write 4 GIG over a 1 hour period.... it is barely a blip on a HD.

As far as I know you cannot direct live TV to another drive other than the recording drives. SageTV treats livetv as if it was a recording that is why when you are viewing Livetv and hit record it will record from the time you started watching.

Channels DVR when watching livetv uses the client storage for the buffer.... therefore if you hit record only from the time you hit record will be saved.

[dinki]

I'm not concerned with speed/bandwidth. My concern is the constant writing going on on the spinning drive and how that might wear it out faster. Perhaps I'm misguided in that thought.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by dinki

I'm not concerned with speed/bandwidth. My concern is the constant writing going on on the spinning drive and how that might wear it out faster. Perhaps I'm misguided in that thought.

Gotcha I think the lifespan of an SSD is lessoned if you fill it up and delete fill it up and delete ... In your case for LiveTV it would not hurt much ... but at the moment there is no way to seperate LiveTV I wish there was. At one time I was recording to an SSD then moving to a nas ... but that defeats the way SageTV maintains space. I was using SJQ to move the files.

A SSD does help with Comskip.

[Striker:WG]

You could solve this with Unraid.

Setup a cache drive pool with SSD's.

When Unraid's nightly mover job kicks in, it will move it to your platter based array.

From Sage's perspective, it will see it all as the same drive.