How do you choose a SSD?

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erkotz

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#21

Post by erkotz » Thu Mar 15, 2012 8:58 pm

mcewinter wrote:
erkotz wrote:Be careful with 64GB - it's a bit on the small side by the time you start putting programs and updates on it. I'd personally recommend 120+GB. I know I personally upgraded my desktop from 80GB to 160GB recently, and I don't game - if you install games, you may want more still. I personally like the Intel drives (and some of those do come with 3.5" mounting rails). Knock on wood, they have been solid for me. There's some other manufacturers (Samsung) I won't touch with a 10 foot poll. Be *VERY* suspect of drives that claim they provide "TRIM-like behavior" - I know at least some of them do it wrong (can cause NTFS corruption in certain situations). I would insist on actual ATA TRIM support.
That's sound advice in a mulipurpose machine, but it may be wasted money in a HTPC unless one was to repurpose the drive. A lot of us here have dedicated HTPCs. On my 80g and 60g I am using less than half of the capacity.
True, but keep in mind that you need some space for Windows's Servicing, and installing a service pack and updates can take a few extra GB. I'm sure it can be done in 40GB, but can get tight depending on how it's used.
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mcewinter

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#22

Post by mcewinter » Thu Mar 15, 2012 9:21 pm

The only "desktop" machines I use are for HTPC purposes, otherwise I use a laptop for everyday usage and if I were to equip that with a SSD I would definitly go well above 120g. It goes to show that we all have our own happy medium and our own habits.

Your statement does cause me to wonder how many of us are using a dedicated HTPC. The subject came up some time ago and I was surprised how many people here actually do not have dedicated machines. I wonder where that stands these days with the advent of some great tuners that are now available. Perhaps we can request a poll over at MR.

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newfiend

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#23

Post by newfiend » Thu Mar 15, 2012 11:03 pm

mcewinter wrote:The only "desktop" machines I use are for HTPC purposes, otherwise I use a laptop for everyday usage and if I were to equip that with a SSD I would definitly go well above 120g. It goes to show that we all have our own happy medium and our own habits.

Your statement does cause me to wonder how many of us are using a dedicated HTPC. The subject came up some time ago and I was surprised how many people here actually do not have dedicated machines. I wonder where that stands these days with the advent of some great tuners that are now available. Perhaps we can request a poll over at MR.
I actually have 4 PC's in the house. One is a dedicated full time HTPC. It's hooked to the TV and I don't like tweaking it much as I don't like messing up TV time for the Family. (however I have done this and messed things up royal a few times!) I try things out on my Desktop PC that has MC but no TV tuner. If It works good on my desktop then I will move that app to my HTPC.

My HTPC has a SSD and it's only 64GB. I install Windows 7, SP1 and all the updates and drivers, TMT5, Media Browser, MCShoutcast, MCL and a few other apps.. I have never had a problem with running out of room on the SSD (main OS drive). I use my HDD's for recording storage and media storage. It has worked out splendid. I would agree with erkotz that 120GB would be better, however for a standablone HTPC a 64GB SSD works just fine, but everyones needs are different. It will depend on how many programs you want to install and if you will be using the HTPC for more than just a HTPC, some like to use it for gaming Etc..and the extra space on a 120GB drive would then come in handy.

I am saving up to build a new Desktop PC soon.. I will be using SSD's in that for the main OS drive and wouldn't consider a drive under 120GB for that. If I can get my way I would actually like at least two of these in RAID 0. :geek:
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richard1980

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#24

Post by richard1980 » Thu Mar 15, 2012 11:52 pm

I agree with mcewinter about the SSD size...I'm using 14ish GB out of my 40GB SSD. The rest is pretty much wasted empty space.

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STC

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#25

Post by STC » Fri Mar 16, 2012 4:03 am

+1 dedicated HTPC with a 64 gig SSD. I have over 60% free space and have had for a long time. Managed properly it wont cause concern.
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WarrenH

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#26

Post by WarrenH » Sat Mar 17, 2012 2:11 pm

I run 40GB Intel SSD on my HTPC, auto updates to Windows, full service packs, and a few other items of software. I have 16GB free space. If its a dedicated HTPC you don't need any more storage.

Beradon

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#27

Post by Beradon » Sat Mar 17, 2012 3:05 pm

I understand and appreciate the input that everyone has placed in this thread, particularly about the size of SSDs, but I have to stand by my original 120gig statement.

Sure you 'can' run an HTPC on something smaller quite successfully, but with the pricepoint of the 120s and the fact that if you plan on doing much more with an HTPC besides Windows and MCE (yes yes, I realize that many of you have dedicated 7MC boxes, as is mine), but I'm not one for liking to limit myself on space, especially when the cost between a 40, 60, 80, 90 and a 120 is so slight, and in fact the 40s, 80s and 90s tend to run high because they are more uncommon.

I think of it more along the lines of this: Think about the US highway and road system (or maybe any country's highway system), its built for capacity of the current number of cars that travel over it and expanded for some leeway for additional capacity, yet there seems to be very little insight into future traffic growth, so it seems that every ~10-15 years or less they put them under major construction to expand/widen/etc those same highways. Sure they put them under constructon for repairs more frequently, but the expansion efforts tend to come more and more often. It always seems to me that they hardly finish the expansion of an area before its put back under construction for more of the same.

Sure PCs are replaced more often than every 10 years, but drives tend to be one of those things I salvage between builds, especially with the fact that SATA III is currently relatively new (only the current generation motherboard chipsets have even begun to natively support it), so with the fact that current SSDs already saturate the interface, that leads me to believe they will be as fast as possible for quite some time, unless someone fast-tracks SATA IV which I dont see happening anytime soon. PCIe SSDs are far too expensive to be viable (and usually too large anyways for HTPC installations).

In using that same analogy, think about the size of programs and indeed operating systems over the years that PCs have been in use, and the storage capacities for those same machines. I remember installing Windows 95 on a 640meg (yes, megabytes) SCSI drive. I remember installing Windows 2000 and XP on 80 gig drives and those being plenty for both Windows and all my games and data. Even my Windows 7 install is on 4x500 gig drives in RAID 5 simply because we werent talking about 1-2TB drives as affordably 2 years ago as we are now. Consider now the fact that we're talking about 3 and 4 terabyte drives. Yes yes, I realize those are the capacities of spinning hard drives, but remember, we use spinning hard drives to augment the much faster SSDs, but what if we didnt need to, or needed them less simply because we HAD the space and performance of a larger SSD.

My newest machine is going to have 2x 120 gig SSDs in it for speed and comfort, not because I need it, and no, its not an HTPC, but I stand by my statement.

So rather than limiting yourself to smaller space for similar cost, I'd say allow yourself that extra space, not because you need to, but because you can.
Last edited by Beradon on Sat Mar 17, 2012 6:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

adam1991

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#28

Post by adam1991 » Sat Mar 17, 2012 5:20 pm

My 7MC boot disk is 103GB. It's nothing more than a DVR, really--but I also have some downloaded Amazon shows on there, just a few, but still.

I think 160GB is the minimum for my comfort level for an SSD as boot disc. Until then, I'll stick with spinning discs.

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mcewinter

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#29

Post by mcewinter » Sun Mar 18, 2012 2:02 am

I don't disagree with going with a larger drive and I would rarely advise somebody to go smaller. My living room HTPC has an 80g (which cost me what a 120g cost now) and I am not a minimalist per se. I have a healthy list of third party software including MyMovies, TMT5, remote potato, dyndns, MCL, MCS, DVRMST, showanalyzer, mobile air mouse pro, tapirex, AnyDVD, mountimage, virtual clone drive, radiotime, hulu desktop, and that's all I can think of right now. Most of that lst are pretty small in size but Windows has every update plus whatever components some of those third parties require. With my computer all cleaned up I'm using 29.3 gigs.

The smaller size drives were more attractive when prices were higher but money is money and I paid $70 les than the 120g (Intel). I paid $5 dollars extra for the retail version as intel provides a bracket, sata cable and power adaptor (wich I didn't needbut felt it was worth mentioning).

Obviously bigger is better, get the biggest drive you can or want to afford but let it be known that you can have a robust HTPC on a 60g or even smaller though that is getting dangerously close.

soccerdad

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#30

Post by soccerdad » Mon Mar 19, 2012 1:36 am

Well I went with a 60GB OCZ and got it for $65 after rebate and it came with a "free" 8 GB USB stick. Free shipping, no tax. I think it was a great deal. So far I have only run it for a day or so, but I am really impressed with how snappy the boot, guide response, and WMC launch is. So far, so good, thanks for all the help. Nothing to do with the SSD, but the install was a nightmare. For some strange reason, the install would not work with my old DVD drive. I ended up copying the win 7 ISO to the handy new USB stick that came with the SSD and loaded it that way. Then the key would not work for some strange reason. 30 minutes with Microsoft and I got a new key and all is well. What Fun!

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#31

Post by volfan6415 » Tue Mar 20, 2012 2:47 pm

[quote="Beradon"]
I think of it more along the lines of this: Think about the US highway and road system (or maybe any country's highway system), its built for capacity of the current number of cars that travel over it and expanded for some leeway for additional capacity, yet there seems to be very little insight into future traffic growth, so it seems that every ~10-15 years or less they put them under major construction to expand/widen/etc those same highways. Sure they put them under constructon for repairs more frequently, but the expansion efforts tend to come more and more often. It always seems to me that they hardly finish the expansion of an area before its put back under construction for more of the same.

[quote]

Not to high jack this thread but wanted to correct your analogy as I worked in highway design for a few years before going to law school. And I felt the overwhelming urge to correct you :D :D :D http://xkcd.com/386/

The problem has more to do with the time lag it takes to get a project from conception through to completion, the typical timeline (unless the project gets fast tracked) is this:
Concept/Planning - 1-2 years
Road Design - 3-5 years
Right of way property Acquisition - 1-3 years
Construction - 1-2 years

And many large projects end up taking way more time than this. The traffic design studies are typically completed during the concept phase/ early road design phase as they dictate the scope of the project. When doing these studies the traffic amounts are forecast out about 15-20 years from the expected date of project completion. The problem is that by the time the project is actually completed (after the inevitable delays and time lags) This ends up meaning that the projected amounts were actually only 4-5 years past the actual completion date. Thus leading to the conclusion that there is no insight into future growth.

As you can't really reliably forecast traffic patterns much farther then 15-20 years the only real solution is to decrease the amount of time it takes to complete these projects. Which is next to impossible given all of the bureaucratic red tape involved with the state and federal DOT's and property acquisition slowing the process down at every step.

But i digress .... now please back to the discussion at hand

Personally I use a 64 gb ssd that currently has 13 gb free. I use the PC primarily as an HTPC however i remote in from time to time and perform other standard computing functions as well.

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newfiend

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#32

Post by newfiend » Tue Mar 20, 2012 8:25 pm

Glad you got it all up and running. I think you will love having the SSD. It really helps out in many ways. Gotta love MS support.. Especially when you need a new activation key.. Been there done that.. I feel your pain.

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#33

Post by Diverge » Wed Mar 21, 2012 5:15 am

I've had no issues using a small SSD as an OS drive (30GB), and a bigger mechanical drive for storage/DVR recording. Windows installs don't take up too much room once you either turn off the page file, or set it to a fixed size just small enough for basic crash log functions. If you don't use hibernate, you can disable it to free up more space (the size of your ram). type 'powercfg -h off' at the command prompt.

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#34

Post by tommo » Thu Mar 22, 2012 1:17 pm

didn't someway say that with a 60Gb SSD after eveything you'd only be left with about 5 hours HD recording time?

I have a server and a dedicated media center machine with a 120GB boot drive only, i just have a batch file to send all recorded tv to the server each night and this method has worked for me though i don't yet have a dvb-t2 (HD) tuner.

richard1980

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#35

Post by richard1980 » Thu Mar 22, 2012 4:19 pm

Most people with SSDs use a separate spinning disk for their recordings, but there are a lot of people that do exactly what you are doing...record to the SSD and then periodically transfer the content to a server. I would not recommend doing this unless your recording schedule is extremely light, as the process of recording severly reduces the lifespan of the SSD.

As for the amount of recording time, that depends on how much of the free space is set aside for the live TV buffer. WMC will block off enough free space on the drive for a full buffer for each of your tuners. Whatever free space is left over can be used for recording.

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#36

Post by assassin » Sun May 13, 2012 5:48 am

richard1980 wrote:the process of recording severly reduces the lifespan of the SSD.
This is mostly a myth. It would take many years to wear out a SSD even if you had very heavy use.

This is an interesting thread.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/sho ... nm-Vs-34nm

Summary from another site on those tests:
The Kingston SSDNow 40GB (rebadged Intel X25-V 40GB 34nm) appears to be crazy reliable. Even after 466TB written, it still passes the data retention test when SSDs with higher capacity using different controllers have already failed. The Intel 320 40GB also performed beyond expectations.

You'd likely see some random controller failure before you hit the limit of NAND endurance.

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#37

Post by richard1980 » Sun May 13, 2012 10:57 am

Intel released a white paper a while back that stated that the average computer user writes approximately 5GB of data to their OS drive per day. At TV content average bitrates (the average is about 12-15 Mbps, so I'll use 13.5 Mbps), each hour of TV is approximately 6 GB. Nielsen estimates the average American watches approximately 5 hours of TV per day. That means to accommodate just the daily TV demand for one average American, an SSD would be required to write 6 times the amount of data as the average computer user normally writes to the drive. In other words, if you look at the lifespan of the drive in terms of time, using the SSD as a recording/buffer drive reduces the lifespan by 5/6, or 83.33%. That alone is a very significant reduction in lifespan, and doesn't take into consideration that many people watch more than 5 hours of TV per day, or that there may be multiple users writing TV data to the drive. To address the former, if we assume a heavy user watches 10 hours of TV per day, the lifespan of the drive is reduced by 91.67%. To address the latter, if we figure a family of 4 all watching 5 hours of unique TV per day, the effect will be a 95.83% reduction in lifespan (again, in terms of time).

Now I don't know about you, but I would say the 83.33% to 95.83% reduction in lifespan that is directly caused by recording/buffering to the SSD is a severe reduction.

As for how long it takes to wear out the SSD, that depends on the expected lifespan of the drive (in terms of time) when the drive isn't used for recording/buffering and the actual reduction percentage when it is used for recording/buffering. Obviously if you have a drive that would normally last 500 years (approximately 900TB of writes @ 5GB per day), a 95.83% reductions is a drastic reduction, but still works out to 21 years of usability. On the other hand, if you have a drive that would normally last only 50 years (approximately 90TB of writes @ 5GB per day), that same 95.83% reduction works out to 2.1 years of usability.

With that said, I am actually surprised by the amount of data written to the SSDs in the test. The amount of data those guys are writing far exceeds any lifespan estimates I have seen. Of particular interest is the difference between how much data could actually be written vs what the media wearout indicator says. I admit that up until now, I have relied heavily on my MWI value to estimate my lifespan (as well as other people's lifespan), but according to that test, the MWI is meaningless.

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WhatHappend

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#38

Post by WhatHappend » Fri May 18, 2012 3:23 am

The MWI is not useless. When the NAND cells are at high wear level they don't retain data for long periods anymore. So if you were to leave a laptop powered off for a 2 month vacation after exceeding the NAND cell wear level you might come back to many data errors.

Those high endurance tests are only looking at the short term data retention.

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#39

Post by barnabas1969 » Fri May 18, 2012 4:04 am

From my experience working for a semiconductor manufacturer... at a company that made the first (and best/most-reliable, at that time) NAND flash modules for the military/aerospace industry in the early 90's (probably rivaling the consumer products that are available today, but at MUCH higher prices!)... I have to agree with WhatHappend. He is absolutely correct. As NAND flash memory wears, the data retention period gets shorter. It's reasonable to assume that the MWI was designed with this fact in mind.

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#40

Post by crawfish » Fri May 18, 2012 4:08 am

Diverge wrote:I've had no issues using a small SSD as an OS drive (30GB), and a bigger mechanical drive for storage/DVR recording. Windows installs don't take up too much room once you either turn off the page file, or set it to a fixed size just small enough for basic crash log functions. If you don't use hibernate, you can disable it to free up more space (the size of your ram). type 'powercfg -h off' at the command prompt.
If you have a bigger SSD for OS drive, I would definitely keep the pagefile and hibernation capabilities. I have 8 GB of RAM now and set my pagefile minimum size to 512 MB. It can grow larger if needed, but that should be rare to never. Since discovering sleep is rock solid in 7x64, I've been using it instead of turning my PC off. By default, Windows enables hybrid sleep, which writes a hibernation file every time you sleep. That's a good way to rack up multiple GBs of unnecessary writes every day, which I would still avoid, as the writes are finite. I determined that if there is a power outage while my PC is asleep, my APC UPS will wake it to hibernate, so I was able to turn off hybrid sleep without chancing what would in effect be a disorderly shutdown in the case of a prolonged power outage occurring while the computer was asleep. So with a UPS, it's possible to get the reliability benefits of hybrid sleep while using regular sleep and so avoiding potentially many TBs of unnecessary writes, but you do have to leave hibernation enabled, though it will rarely be used.

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