[PanamaMike]

Has anyone tried this? Does this work well? I think this is the major culprit for Tivo deaths. I've had the drive die on me 3 times, about 2 years per drive. Maybe SSD is the answer to this problem.


Mike

 

[mike_311]

sure but you are going to pay fortune to get a large enough drive to buffer hdtv...

 

[stanger89]

I don't know, SSD's have limited write cycles as well. I'd bet the HDD failures in the Tivo were more due to heat than usage.

 

[S-dogg]



Quote:
Originally Posted by stanger89 /forum/post/16857895


I don't know, SSD's have limited write cycles as well. I'd bet the HDD failures in the Tivo were more due to heat than usage.

Agreed. Live buffers are in a constant write cycle. As an example, the SSD in my netbook is rated at 20GB writes/day for 5 years. After that, the unit is junk. 20 GBs is only a couple of hours of live TV, so the drive would probably be dead in far less than a year.

 

[edmc]

Assuming you aren't live buffering constantly, the lifespan of the SSD may be more than adequate to get you to the next generation of SSDs bound to be both bigger and cheaper by the time a currently purchased one fails.


But it's the failure you seemed to be wanting to avoid - so I'd concur with earlier posters that going traditional HD is the way to go.


One suggestion is to make sure you format the drive with 64KB clusters rather than just taking the default (e.g. 8KB). This not only will maximize the performance of your hard disk (i.e. getting "random" access to be as fast as "streaming" access) but also go a long way to reducing the number of seeks per unit time (a contributor to hard disk failure).

 

[PanamaMike]

 SSD write endurance myth


I didn't realize that SSD came in two flavors, turns out the general consumer, ie cheap variant, do have short life expectancy.


I was thinking 64GB for OS and cache.


Mike

 

[Adidas4275]

you could use a virtual ram disk to do this on a PC, get like 16gb of RAM and use it as a ramdisk

 

[captain_video]



Quote:
Originally Posted by PanamaMike /forum/post/16859816

SSD write endurance myth


I didn't realize that SSD came in two flavors, turns out the general consumer, ie cheap variant, do have short life expectancy.


I was thinking 64GB for OS and cache.


Mike

That's exactly what I did for my main PC. I picked up a Kingston 64GB SSD a while back (shows up as a Samsung in the BIOS and POST screens) and I'm using it in my main PC for the OS boot drive. There were reported issues with earlier versions of this drive but they are supposed to have been worked out. So far it's working fine and I have noticed a slight improvement in performance, mostly in faster boot up times.