Few questions to see if Media Portal is right for me (1 Viewer)

[revs]

This is true - the new SSDs dont 'wear out', well they might in 5 -10 years, but by then you will have replaced anyway

 

[Zagan]

I will still promote RAM-drives over SSD-drives, even though some fails to see the advantage

SSD-drives are expensive and wears out considerably faster than SDRAM, but maybe you should just start by timeshifting to the harddrive and then take it from there.

8 GB of DDR3 SDRAM can be had for ~ £60, and you need some RAM for the server anyways...

I don't know how you come up with that rubbish.

all SSD drives have lasted about 1,000,000 hours of use, that equals just over 114 years of 24/7 use and never turned off, you'll probably fail before the SSD drive fails.

I have an SSD drive and I can say it's the best computer item I've ever bought, I run win7-64bit and it'll load it up in 3 seconds pushing, I can hit the power button do a 360 turn and it'll be fully loaded and ready to go when I'm facing the computer again and it's still like that after 6+ months of use.

Ram drives are the exact same thing as an SSD drive but don't keep the data when turned off, they also won't have the trim support so all mem spots will always be holding data in them and slow down over time where as all SSD drives will have that but Win7 is required to use the trim function it's not supported on XP or vista and MS isn't releasing any patches to change that.

RAID will probably be the best option RAID 1 with 4 HDD as each HDD can be used at the same time where as SSD while transferring at 150+meg a second or higher will only be one drive and will get held up by the SATA device, seeing as there will be up to 8 channels of data coming in.

Also DATA space will be important, I have 500gig spare for TV shows and that's 300hours of HD recording split 8 ways your looking at 37 hours of recorded shows.

SSD's while stupidly fast, you'll only have small space limits timeshifting can be reduced in time but if your recording to that same drive and it was eurovision or a sporting match you could kill the whole time shifting setting with 1 show.

 

[kiwijunglist]

No need for RAM drive or SSD, i think a tvserver serving only 3 clients could run with just 1x HDD for OS and 1x HDD for timeshifting+recording. I would choose dedicated timeshift ram disk over dedicated timeshifting SSD. Windows bootup times are irrelevant on a tvserver. How often are you going to be having more than 3 channels running at a time? If you did want sweet setup I would choose timeshift ramdisk over ssd.

 

[cheezey]

Your requirements mirror my own so here are answers based on my setup (1 TV Server/MP client in the lounge and 2 MP clients in teenage girls bedrooms so are used 25 hours a day ), just to give you another view:

1. Absolutely.
2. Lots. I have a single Blackgold 6-in-1 with the DVB-T and a single DVB-S used - this is sufficient to handle all live TV / recordings in the house thanks to the fact that the TV server supports watching/recording multiple channels from a single mux.
3. I use Windows 7 x64 - rock solid.
4. My TV Server is a 4 year old HP desktop, 2Gb RAM and 2 x 500HDD, the clients are even older. My TV Server does all TV recording, timeshifting and stores all movies, TV series & music for all clients.
5. All timeshifting is done on the TV server.

As you can see you certainly do not need lots of bells & whistles for MediaPortal - but I'm sure they'd help

 

[pilehave]

I will still promote RAM-drives over SSD-drives, even though some fails to see the advantage

SSD-drives are expensive and wears out considerably faster than SDRAM, but maybe you should just start by timeshifting to the harddrive and then take it from there.

8 GB of DDR3 SDRAM can be had for ~ £60, and you need some RAM for the server anyways...

I don't know how you come up with that rubbish.

all SSD drives have lasted about 1,000,000 hours of use, that equals just over 114 years of 24/7 use and never turned off, you'll probably fail before the SSD drive fails.

Can I borrow your timemachine when you're done with it? Apparently you went forward in time and found that SSD-drives are invincible. Amazing.

Since you obviously failed to recognize the difference between flash memory and DRAM I don't see any point in discussing this matter with you, untill you have read up on the subject. I suggest Googling the issue...

 

[Zagan]

I will still promote RAM-drives over SSD-drives, even though some fails to see the advantage

SSD-drives are expensive and wears out considerably faster than SDRAM, but maybe you should just start by timeshifting to the harddrive and then take it from there.

8 GB of DDR3 SDRAM can be had for ~ £60, and you need some RAM for the server anyways...

I don't know how you come up with that rubbish.

all SSD drives have lasted about 1,000,000 hours of use, that equals just over 114 years of 24/7 use and never turned off, you'll probably fail before the SSD drive fails.

Can I borrow your timemachine when you're done with it? Apparently you went forward in time and found that SSD-drives are invincible. Amazing.

Since you obviously failed to recognize the difference between flash memory and DRAM I don't see any point in discussing this matter with you, untill you have read up on the subject. I suggest Googling the issue...

No time machine needed, I have hard drives that have lasted for 10 years some are still going.

SSDs have no moving parts, solid metal casing, slightly smaller than the size of a credit card and weigh around 100 grams be pretty hard to kill it unless it got zapped in a storm, but the power box would go before that happened, after all they are designed for laptops not so much desktop computers.

The life time of the memory chips used in a SSD drive, ist 114 years before the memory chips themselves die.

people with SSDs complain more at the the slowing of speed than the life but Trim support is there to combat that but when people talk about slowing they mean... it's only read/write around 100 meg a second so it's not exactly slow slow.

Ram disks and windows can make these drives isn't anything new (been around since the 80's) but if you want to keep the data on them you need to dump the data off to another drive, so a brown out can wipe or drop these drives, the other problem is the ram drive will only be a couple gigs in size, I used to use a memory stick for the page file to help windows out and it was 2gig and the page file would fill it at times causing windows to stall and other problems.


I wouldn't be scared of SSDs as in a few years they'll kill the old hard drives as they are starting to get up to 500+gig.

No need for RAM drive or SSD, i think a tvserver serving only 3 clients could run with just 1x HDD for OS and 1x HDD for timeshifting+recording. I would choose dedicated timeshift ram disk over dedicated timeshifting SSD. Windows bootup times are irrelevant on a tvserver. How often are you going to be having more than 3 channels running at a time? If you did want sweet setup I would choose timeshift ramdisk over ssd.

Only problem with HDD is fragging it up too much.

 

[pilehave]

I don't know how you come up with that rubbish.

all SSD drives have lasted about 1,000,000 hours of use, that equals just over 114 years of 24/7 use and never turned off, you'll probably fail before the SSD drive fails.

Can I borrow your timemachine when you're done with it? Apparently you went forward in time and found that SSD-drives are invincible. Amazing.

Since you obviously failed to recognize the difference between flash memory and DRAM I don't see any point in discussing this matter with you, untill you have read up on the subject. I suggest Googling the issue...

No time machine needed, I have hard drives that have lasted for 10 years some are still going.

SSDs have no moving parts, solid metal casing, slightly smaller than the size of a credit card and weigh around 100 grams be pretty hard to kill it unless it got zapped in a storm, but the power box would go before that happened, after all they are designed for laptops not so much desktop computers.

The life time of the memory chips used in a SSD drive, ist 114 years before the memory chips themselves die.

SSD lifetime is not a matter of moving or non-moving parts, it is the repetetive writing to the SSD especially for MLC-based drives. SLC's are expected to have a remarkably longer lifespan than MLC. Time will have to tell.

Now, quality and wear-management has improved a lot in the last year or so, but we have had several SSD's that have died within a 2-year span with regular use. Typical failure scheme is first that SMART reports that the drive has faulty sectors, then the corrupted data and then the OS refusing to boot.

I myself use a SSD in my own HTPC for OS. So I'm not saying that they're not handy and fast, but consider the use-case at hand. At least buy SLC-based drives

 

[Zagan]

SSD lifetime is not a matter of moving or non-moving parts, it is the repetetive writing to the SSD especially for MLC-based drives. SLC's are expected to have a remarkably longer lifespan than MLC. Time will have to tell.

Now, quality and wear-management has improved a lot in the last year or so, but we have had several SSD's that have died within a 2-year span with regular use. Typical failure scheme is first that SMART reports that the drive has faulty sectors, then the corrupted data and then the OS refusing to boot.

I myself use a SSD in my own HTPC for OS. So I'm not saying that they're not handy and fast, but consider the use-case at hand. At least buy SLC-based drives

ok, but I think a lot of that comes from the drive being full and not being able to trim/remove non-existing data, seems to be the most important thing ATM, but it's only supported in win7 currently.


The only reason why I bring up SSDs is that I'm recording digital std and 1080i TV shows/channels and recording a 1 hour digital std your looking at 2-3 gigs of data, 1 hour of 1080i is around 6-7 gigs on it's own.

I have shows that are std digital 6 hours long, that's 12 gigs of data on it's own.

So if your going to time-shift an hour or 2 your going to want some decent space as your going to be pushing a SATA or IDE to the max once you start adding lots of tuners.

Having 1 or 2 tuners isn't going to mean much, but some people are talking about 6 and 8 tuners, the CPU usage is going to go through the roof encoding and processing a lot of stuff beside the SATA headend having to push 100's of megs of data.

it's something to think about.

 

[MLH01]

Hi All,

Just some information on my setup: I have 2 dual DVB-T tuners with 2 hard disks (1 for OS and MP, the other for recordings). I use the OS drive for timeshifting, as it has a lower loading if the recording drive is being used for watching recorded TV or recording something. When I bought the second tuner, I did a quick test to see how many channels I could record at once. I got it up to 9 channels recording simultaneously (mix of around half SD and half HD) without a problem. In theory I could have gone up to 13 channels at the time (using multiple channels per transponder), but I didn't bother going over 9. This was recording onto 1 hard disk - admittedly it was working hard, but it was only a test.

Also remember that timeshifting is only done for the live channels being watched. Up to 3 or 4 live channels being watched at the same time and I would be recommending a RAM disk for timeshifting over an SSD - and it doesn't matter if timeshifting data is lost due to power loss anyway. As others have advised, if you decide on a RAM disk go for Win7 x64, which will allow plenty of RAM to use for timeshifting.

Personally, I would go for Win7 x64, 2 hard disks (as above) and see how it goes. Then upgrade (to RAM disk or SSD) if necessary. Based on the test I did, I would be surprised if it was necessary though.

Only my opinion

MLH01.

 

[spwlsl]

"the TV server supports watching/recording multiple channels from a single mux" - I'm new to MediaPortal, does this mean with a single USB receiver I can record on one channel and watch on another ?

If so, can you point me at the relevant info in the wiki or wherever ?

If not, what does "a single mux" mean ?

Thanks in advance,

Steve