Dedicated Timeshifting Drive (1 Viewer)

[revs]

I have a spare 2.5" 70GB HD, and decided to stick it in my MediaPortal HTPC and use it as a Timeshifting drive.

My theory was that as MP constantly timeshifts, then having it do it on a seperate HD would give better performance. As If I only had one HD then it would be jumping back and forth between Application files and the timeshift.

Does this make sense, or is there really no advantage?

 

[pilehave]

There's no doubt, that using a dedicated drive increases performance. But remember that the disk will still be used to read from and write to, at the same time. The best solution would be to use a RAM-drive, on Vista or XP 64-bit you could use a large amount of RAM for that, like 4 GB or so.

On XP 32-bit the total amount is limited to 4 GB, including reserved space for periphials like graphics card and the like.

What interface are you using, IDE or S-ATA? And how fast is this old drive? 4200 rpm or 5400 rpm?

 

[revs]

it's a SATA drive on a seperate bus, so should not interfear with other drives. seems to handle timeshifting SD and HD at the same time.

I guess it cant hurt!

 

[wonkyd]

Was there any noticeable benefit? Considering doing this myself...

 

[mdbarber]

I noticed a marked increase in usability of the box whilst timeshifting from doing this, in mine i used a PATA drive as my main drive was SATA.
Previously any button bashing from the mrs caused frequent lockups which almost disappeared after fitting the second drive.

pilehave, what software are you proposing to create the RAM drive with?, might like to explore that when i have time

 

[pilehave]

@pilehave, what software are you proposing to create the RAM drive with?, might like to explore that when i have time

I followed the guide at TV-Server/UserGuides/Ramdisk - MediaPortal Wiki Documentation and used RRamdisk to create the disk. It just works