OS and Timeshifting - what are my options? (1 Viewer)

[elsmandino]

Hi there,

I am currently building a dedicated server to host media portal.

I plan on putting in a WD AV-GP HDD (1.5TB) to do all my recording, a Samsung F4 HDD (2TB) for all my other media - photos, music etc.

I don't really want to put time-shifting on either of these drives and decided that it would probably be best to put in a small dedicated hard drive just for time-shifting and the OS (so it is not disastrous if this hard drives goes kaputt from the constant time-shifting).

I want to keep heat/noise/energy to a minimum with this third hard drive, thus I have three options:

1. Use a small 2.5" laptop hard drive
2. Use a small SSD drive - but won't time-shifting to this, wear it out very quickly?
3. Put the OS on one of the two hard drives and time shift to a RAM disk - I know very little about this, but how much RAM would I need? I have a few High-definition channels and there is the potential for perhaps three clients to be watching live TV (though this probably wouldn't happen very often).

Thanks

 

[elsmandino]

One other option:

4. Put OS on one the existing hard drives and timeshift to a USB flash drive - will this wear it out very quickly?

 

[miroslav22]

I'd recommend either a small magnetic hard disk or an SSD, depending on your budget. An SSD will give better performance with clients (especially on HD) but you'll pay quite a lot more.

The recent generations of SSD don't really wear out so there's no worries about that (well the larger ones anyway). They can run at maximum write load for 10-15 years before the cells start failing.

A USB memory stick probably isn't likely to work very well.

 

[elsmandino]

That's great - I didn't realise that SSDs had come on that much - I was expecting one to wear out after six months of time shifting.

Given you say that that it gives better performance with clients (I could potentially end up with four/five), I am pretty tempted to go with one of them over a magnetic drive, despite the significantly higher price.

Which of these newer SSDs should I be looking at?

Also, other than putting just my OS and time shifting on a SSD, are there any other things that I could also move to this drive to improve my media portal server? - e.g. my artwork for mp3s or the artwork/information that gets downloaded with the Moving Pictures plugin?

Thanks

 

[elsmandino]

After sniffing around the websites, I decided I couldn't bring my self to buy a small SSD when you can get a 500GB 2.5" for next to nothing, so went with one of these instead.

Just out of interest - are there any recommendations for partitioning such a hard drive for Media Portal:

e.g.

Partition 1 - OS
Partition 2 - Time Shifting
Partition 3 - MP3 album art/film art etc
Partition 4 - Any other storage

 

[porky996t]

elsmandino,

Did you get any recommendations for an SSD? I'm looking to use one purely for timeshifting, and not sure which to go for.


Cheers,


M