Time Shifting on USB flash drive (1 Viewer)

[giantjoebot]

I'm planning out my HTPC/Media Server, and and-81 here on the media portal forum suggested that I divided the load for media portal on to 3 drives (OS, Recording, and time shifting) since I'll be using 1 server and 2 clients, plus I'll have several other apps running. I did some calculations, and I should be fine with recording and time shifting on one drive even when I move to HD, but it still might be a good idea to lighten the load a bit. The problem is the drive space in my case is limited, and it will also be storing all my media. I really don't want to take up one of the bays just for time shifting, because that means 250 to 500gb less that I can add to my storage capacity. So I was thinking that I could use a USB flash drive for time shifting, but I'm worried that it might wear out too fast. I know people that use them for web caches in Linux firewalls, which also reads and writes a lot, but does time shifting a constant process? I have had a couple different DVRs, and it seems as though time shifting is always going on them. The USB flash drive that I plan on using is the CORSAIR Flash Voyager GT 2GB Flash Drive. According to my calculation below it should be able to handel SD and HD time shifting.

HD records at 10GB/hour
there are 3600 seconds in one hour
10,000/MB/3600=2.78MB/s
SD is one tenth the speed HD = 278KB/s

Here is a Link to another thread with more details on my system plans
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/media_server_htpc_all_one_need_some-p150552.html#post150552

 

[piranha]

From Wikipedia...

......and modern NAND-based flash drives often last for 500,000 or more erase/write cycles....

Hmm.. You still sure about your choice?

 

[giantjoebot]

Well I don't know, thats why I'm asking.

When I was reading the wiki it said "The endurance of NAND flash is much greater than that of NOR flash (typically 1,000,000 cycles vs. 100,000 cycles)" which is twice what you stated.

I do have a 40GB 4200rpm laptop drive in an external USB enclosure that I guess that I could use. It would be really easy to mount it inside the case, and connect it directly to the USB headers on the motherboard.

There are a couple of spots where I could fit another drive, but they are in places such as the floppy drive bay where the drive would be enclosed on all sides but one, and no fans blowing on it. I also have a 40GB maxtor that runs really hot, and a 80GB maxtor extra right now. I guess if I put one of those in the floppy bay, and got a USB to IDE adapter that would work, but I'm worried that the drive would fail due to heat.

 

[gxtracker]

I have one drive in my systems with two partitions: OS and Storage. Recordings are stored on the storage drive and defragmented automatically every week by script.

When recording SD content, hard drive activity is actually quite low. You'll get I/O operations of no more than about 2mb/s MAX which results in a quick flash of your hard drive light every second or so. Of course the more streams you have recording at the same time the more I/O activity you will have.

 

[giantjoebot]

So your saying that I would be fine putting both on time shifting and recording on one drive? No need to use a USD flash drive or anything like that.