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adam1991

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#41

Post by adam1991 » Mon Jan 02, 2012 12:08 am

I keep hearing about "the OS boots really fast!"--but I'm confused. How often does anyone actually power down a modern computer?

Other than for OS updates, my computers are vitually never off. Asleep, maybe--but never OFF.

So the lure of "fast OS boot" is meaningless in a modern world, where you might do that only a handful of times over the life of the machine.

LuckyDay

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#42

Post by LuckyDay » Mon Jan 02, 2012 12:58 am

For me it depends on the machine and what I use it for.

My HTPC stays on, uses sleep mode, and restarts itself once a night.

When I'm watching tv and have the rare tuner error where I want to reboot, it's nice to have the SSD.

But on my gaming machine I turn my PC off after every session. That's when there's a real benefit for having a fast boot.

I agree in an HTPC setting, the performance gains are minimal. They are certainly there, but it's not a necessity for me to have one.

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#43

Post by LuckyDay » Mon Jan 02, 2012 12:59 am

I would also add for anyone who uses hibernate mode, it probably makes a huge difference.

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#44

Post by StumpyBloke » Mon Jan 02, 2012 11:30 am

LuckyDay wrote:I would also add for anyone who uses hibernate mode, it probably makes a huge difference.
That's me!!! :)
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#45

Post by IT Troll » Mon Jan 02, 2012 11:48 am

richard1980 wrote:I agree that having static information on the SSD is expensive, but just because the data is initially written to the SSD doesn't mean it stays there. Some people use their HTPC for recording and playback, but the recordings are transferred to remote storage locations (such as another PC, WHS, or a NAS). Also, there are some people that don't keep recordings very long, so the data isn't really static. Additionally, consider a scenario where the HTPC is primarily used as a client that watches live TV.

So if you are already going to build an HTPC with an SSD, do you really want to spend any additional money putting a HDD in the system?

Like I said, each scenario is different. All three of these scenarios have potential for an SSD being the best choice. There's no hard rule one way or another. You just have to evaluate each scenario and see what you come up with.
Other than the live TV only scenario, you are going to need some form of secondary storage or a very large (and therefore expensive) SSD. A typical film recorded in HD is ~10GB; you don't get many of them to an SSD! :o

Keeping your Recorded TV on a separate physical drive also improves overall performance as there is less competition for drive access. I have four tuners in my HTPC and so when they are all recording simultaneously I don't want them competing with the O/S, Media Center, SQL etc. for disk.

I would argue that very small SSD partnered with a large HDD still offers best performance and value in the majority of cases.
Are you a Recorded TV HD user or want to give it a try? Check out the new community-made update; Recorded TV HD v2.1.1

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#46

Post by richard1980 » Mon Jan 02, 2012 4:17 pm

You are correct that space is very limited with an SSD. However, you have to look at how much space is actually required on the SSD to accomplish the mission. We know a live TV scenario doesn't require much space, so let's look at the other two scenarios:
  • For the scenario where recordings are transferred to a remote location, generally this would done after each recording is completed or on a daily schedule. The preferred method would be to transfer as soon as the recording is complete, so if we assume the longest recording is 4 hours (to account for really long movies), you'd need about 21.6 GB of free space on the drive (average bitrate = 12 Mbps).
  • For the scenario where the user regularly watches then deletes their recordings, the average person watches 7 hours of TV per day. Therefore, each day of recording requires approximately 37.8 GB of space (again, average bitrate=12 Mbps).
In the first scenario, a 64 GB SSD would be more than enough room, and in the 2nd scenario I'd say 64 GB would be very tight...it would probably be better to go with 120/128 GB. That should yield 2.5 to 3 days of buffer room. If you need any more than that, you'll pay quite a premium to get a larger SSD. I priced a HDD+SSD combo at Newegg (30 GB OCZ Vertex ($65) + 500 GB Western Digital Caviar Green ($130+$6)...that's $200. You can pick up a relatively crappy 120 GB SSD for $125, and get a much better 120/128 GB SSD for about $150-$175. So in both of these scenarios, it's more cost effective to go with the single SSD instead of the SSD+HDD combo. Really the only time it is more cost effective to go with the combo is if you need all the extra storage space offered by the HDD. Otherwise (at today's current market prices), it's cheaper to go with just a single SSD.

As for the performance, I think you are underestimating the power of both SSDs and HDDs WRT purpose-built HTPCs. The observable impact of recording 4 streams simultaneously on an HDD is minimal (even if the HDD also contains the OS), and is virtually non-existent on an SSD. Even a slow HDD like a Caviar Green can handle 8+ simultaneous recordings, and SSDs are far more effective at writing than HDDs. Considering all three of my scenarios involve purpose-built PCs that specialize in live TV/DVR functions, there's no reason to plan for massive amounts of throughput.

adam1991

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#47

Post by adam1991 » Mon Jan 02, 2012 6:21 pm

Your scenario doesn't take into account:

http://blog.sfgate.com/tgoodman/2006/10 ... -you-tivo/

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#48

Post by richard1980 » Mon Jan 02, 2012 8:31 pm

Adam, none of the three scenarios I posted involve not watching what you record. I am not disputing that storage is required when you don't watch your recordings. It's common sense that you need storage space if you don't watch your recordings.

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#49

Post by adam1991 » Mon Jan 02, 2012 9:47 pm

I know. I just like the concept--and I practice it sometimes.
I am not disputing that storage is required when you don't watch your recordings. It's common sense that you need storage space if you don't watch your recordings.
Well, if you don't watch them right away, anyway.

As Ceton comes out with a 6 stream tuner, and as more people put in multiple tuner cards, TiNO is more and more of a regular thing. I can't imagine going to the bother of setting up a 7MC system solely to record *exactly* the small handful of regular shows to watch and delete every day.

I am just getting over a cold, and I've spend the last three days lying around watching the stuff that I've collected to watch "when I get around to it". Glad I had that stuff already collected.

Also, early in the season someone recommended Person of Interest. I knew nothing about it, but hey, recording it is free--so I grabbed it. Several weeks in, I decided to take a look--and I was hooked. Thankfully, I had them all there waiting to be watched.

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#50

Post by erkotz » Mon Jan 02, 2012 11:57 pm

I'm in a similar situation as Adam. I record what I jokingly refer to as "Emergency TV" - basically, stuff that I have no real intention of watching, but if I end up sick/really bored/just want background noise, I'll put on. In fact, I don't delete recordings at all - I just have MCE set up to automatically delete the oldest stuff. That gives me roughly about 700 shows on my hard drive at any time I can watch (about 2 weeks' worth of recordings and about 50 recordings a day)
Quality Assurance Manager, Ceton Corporation

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#51

Post by IT Troll » Tue Jan 03, 2012 12:44 am

For the remote location scenario you still need an investment in secondary storage; be it SAN, WHS, or whatever and so this is just another way of carving up the SSD + HDD model.

The single SSD model falls over as soon as you have to consider a one or two week vacation. It also rules out saving a favourite recording for a second viewing. I imagine Media Center users will also be looking to store the other types of media; music, pictures, and video on their system.

The current pricing of HDD is very skewed due to world events which is slightly muddying the water. Just prior to the price increases I purchased 2 x 1TB Samung F3 HDD for the cost equivalent of a single 64GB SSD. Even so, current pricing in the UK means that 64GB of good SSD is roughly equal to 1TB of good HDD in cost terms.

Best value does not mean cheapest. I would argue that spending an extra 30% for 5 times the storage is a wiser long term investment. Remember the storage adage; work out how much you currently need to store, double it, and then double it again...
Are you a Recorded TV HD user or want to give it a try? Check out the new community-made update; Recorded TV HD v2.1.1

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#52

Post by richard1980 » Tue Jan 03, 2012 1:44 am

IT Troll wrote:For the remote location scenario you still need an investment in secondary storage; be it SAN, WHS, or whatever and so this is just another way of carving up the SSD + HDD model.
You are arguing a point that I didn't make. I never said you wouldn't need HDDs in the server. I said you don't necessarily need a HDD in the client. Slap an SSD in the client and transfer the recordings to the server. There's no reason to have a HDD in the client unless you are recording so much stuff that you are going to kill the SSD prematurely with all the writing. Essentially, the HDD is just a waste of money in a system that has a high enough SSD lifespan.
IT Troll wrote:The single SSD model falls over as soon as you have to consider a one or two week vacation. It also rules out saving a favourite recording for a second viewing. I imagine Media Center users will also be looking to store the other types of media; music, pictures, and video on their system.
And that doesn't follow the scenario I presented. You are throwing changes into the scenario. Obviously if you change the scenario, you might get a different answer. And yes, I would agree that if you want to go on a vacation or save recordings for future viewing, you're probably going to want to go with a HDD....but only because HDDs are cheaper than a comparable sized SSD.
IT Troll wrote:The current pricing of HDD is very skewed due to world events which is slightly muddying the water. Just prior to the price increases I purchased 2 x 1TB Samung F3 HDD for the cost equivalent of a single 64GB SSD. Even so, current pricing in the UK means that 64GB of good SSD is roughly equal to 1TB of good HDD in cost terms.
It doesn't matter what you could do yesterday. What matters is what you can do today. Times change and so does the market. Maybe sometime in the future HDD prices drop back to reasonable levels, but then again, maybe they don't. Maybe they remain high and SSD prices continue their drop. Who knows? I'm not here to speculate about what may or may not happen. Try to build a PC today, and my numbers are accurate.
IT Troll wrote:Best value does not mean cheapest. I would argue that spending an extra 30% for 5 times the storage is a wiser long term investment.
And I would argue that if you don't need the extra storage, spending any money on it is a waste. That's been my entire argument here. You only need as much space in an HTPC as you are going to actually use, and not every scenario requires lots of storage space in the HTPC. There are at least three scenarios where little storage space works just fine. So having extra (unused) storage space is a waste of money in those systems.

I remember almost 2 years ago I posted my newest build specs on the old TGB. At that time, I was just going to go with a 500 GB HDD. Several people recommended I bump it up to 2TB because I would need all that extra space. Well guess what? I have a 2TB HDD and I can't recall every having more than about 500GB of recordings on it. What good is that extra storage (1.5 TB worth of wasted storage space) doing me? None. It gives me extra potential, but the reality is I'm not using the extra space. I could have saved a lot of money by sticking with the 500GB drive instead of buying the 2TB drive.

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#53

Post by adam1991 » Tue Jan 03, 2012 1:49 am

erkotz wrote:I'm in a similar situation as Adam. I record what I jokingly refer to as "Emergency TV" - basically, stuff that I have no real intention of watching, but if I end up sick/really bored/just want background noise, I'll put on. In fact, I don't delete recordings at all - I just have MCE set up to automatically delete the oldest stuff. That gives me roughly about 700 shows on my hard drive at any time I can watch (about 2 weeks' worth of recordings and about 50 recordings a day)
yep, that's exactly how I do it. Let MC delete what it needs to, watched or not.

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#54

Post by J3ff » Tue Jan 03, 2012 3:31 am

Adam, I'm sorry to say it like this, but You obviously are not experienced enough with WMC and quality SSD's to see the difference. The reason I can say this is fact is because you seem to have very little idea of what an SSD could do to improve the overall WMC experience. Even though many people here are telling you different you seem to sit here and not believe them.

My friend, it makes a huge difference, from turning on the computer (some of us have ours sleep for power reasons) to pressing the guide button, to searching the live tv listings, to pulling up the little picture icons in "recorded tv" ... it's a 100% improvement over a spinning disk.

I'm using a core2duo dell xps 420 as my htpc, 4gb ram and dual 60 gig ssd's setup in a raid 0 configuration. That's how it's been since I set it up, as my first HTPC. I am in IT and do seem to have a ton of these ssd's floating around my home (2 in the htpc, 2 in the gaming pc, 1 in my laptop) so it isn't a surprise to me when I visit a friend who has his htpc setup on a conventional drive and it takes SECONDS to pull up all the icons, you press guide and again, it isn't instant. I just don't know how you can sit here and not see the difference.

My hard wired xbox 360's via gigabit switches (even though the 360 doesnt have a gigabit port) respond immediately to any button push. I read all about this lag that others talk about and I simply don't have it.

I've got plenty of storage space and do not set my storage drive to sleep while the computer is being used... Image

Try it out, and see the difference, then come back here and continue to tell us we are wrong.

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#55

Post by IT Troll » Tue Jan 03, 2012 12:56 pm

richard1980 wrote:And that doesn't follow the scenario I presented. You are throwing changes into the scenario. Obviously if you change the scenario, you might get a different answer. And yes, I would agree that if you want to go on a vacation or save recordings for future viewing, you're probably going to want to go with a HDD....but only because HDDs are cheaper than a comparable sized SSD.
This is just the real world extension to your scenario. The solution must fit the real world usage to viable.

Scenarios such as; only ever watch Live TV, or Watch and delete all Recorded TV the same day (and never go on vacation) may support your recommendation but this is not how people typically use their HTPC.

I am sure there will be a day when we can just buy a big fat SSD (at a sensible price) and it will do everything. But we are not there yet and so at today's prices an SSD and HDD combo is the best real world solution for the majority.

As mentioned before, having separate physical drives reduces competition for disk access which improves the responsiness of the system - which is the whole purpose of recommending the SSD in the first place. Whilst a single drive can handle the task you will get a much snappier user experience from the two. Keeping the disk queue length low on the system drive results in a much more responsive Media Center interface. Again in real world usage, your HTPC is recording several things simultaneously and perhaps also streaming some media to other devices in your network. You then want to check your scheduled recordings or search the guide to add a new recording. Guess which request gets thrown to the back of the queue. In the eyes of the operating system your interaction can wait because it is not time critical.

Selecting a HDD is not just about the capacity, it can also offer improved performance due to the physical properties of the drive (number of platters and data density). 1TB drives are in the sweetspot of performance and capacity. A drive like the Samsung 1TB F3 overs sustained write performance on large files which almost matches that of SSDs and so an SSD currently offers no real advantage as a media drive especially given the cost.
Are you a Recorded TV HD user or want to give it a try? Check out the new community-made update; Recorded TV HD v2.1.1

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#56

Post by J3ff » Tue Jan 03, 2012 5:05 pm

There's also hybrid drives now, 8gb flash /500 gb conventional. I don't know if it'd be smart enough to keep all the WMC menu functions on the flash based part or not, but I have one of those in a laptop here and it's a bit snappier.

adam1991

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#57

Post by adam1991 » Tue Jan 03, 2012 5:25 pm

Would a hybrid drive try to do the same thing that ReadyBoost does?

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#58

Post by IT Troll » Tue Jan 03, 2012 5:48 pm

I don't believe you can partition them as separate drives, they just appear as a single device. The SSD part acts as a large cache for the HDD with the algorithm at the hardware level determining what goes in the cache. They will be faster than a standard HDD but wont give you the same level of performance as a pure SSD.
Are you a Recorded TV HD user or want to give it a try? Check out the new community-made update; Recorded TV HD v2.1.1

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#59

Post by lurch66 » Wed Jan 04, 2012 3:27 am

I have been keeping an eye on this post for a while and picked up a 128 gig Samsung ssd over the holidays and did a clean install last night and I must say he#l yes. I went from a 3 min reboot to about 30 sec with media center loaded and operational other than my cable card tuners which come online about 60 sec later. Everything is just quicker. the guide loads instantly rather than taking 6-10 sec and media browser has much faster navigation. Great investment. :clap:

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#60

Post by guppy » Wed Jan 04, 2012 4:28 am

I have been holding off on the SSD strictly due to it's high cost. However something unexpected has happened and now the SSD price does not look so bad .. compared to the current price of Sata drives.

Sata's have more than doubled in price due to the floods in Thailand (Monsoon season was from July thru Dec in 2011)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... ageSize=20


Whenever the time comes I will be replacing my"Boot" drive with a SSD.

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