timeshift to flash memory (SD/CF card, USB-Drive) (1 Viewer)

[kszabo]

Good morning!

What do you people think:

Is it a good idea to timeshift to Flash Memory?

My concerns:
- we could avoid harddrive usage (noise, wear)
- it has to be formatted to FAT
- are they fast enough?
- can they be used permanently (read-write all the time)

I have a barebone with integrated card reader. I could plug a 1-2 GB card inside for this purpose. For RAM-Disk I don´t have enough RAM (2 GB minus shared video memory of 256 MB with XP).

 

[burr]

A lot of people say that you should avoid writing to much to the Flash card cause you reduce the life time of the
card. Also the writing speed is slower then a regular harddrive.

I'm trying to get a dedicated TvServer using regular hard disks and clients that is using flash card.

 

[RobNorthcott]

I'm reviving this old thread because I've been playing around with using a flash drive for timeshift for a couple of months. It's a cheap (i.e. cost about £5) 4GB stick, not a fancy fast one. It was working pretty well, but I used to get the occasional small stutter every few minutes. I tried turning on the cache ("optimise for performance" in the drive properties) but that didn't cure it.

Then a week or so ago I thought I'd try formatting the stick NTFS and see if that made any difference. Hasn't stuttered once since
It seems like XP is much happier reading/writing to an NTFS flash drive than a FAT one.

As for the life of the memory, at that price I don't really care if it only lasts a year, or six months. I don't watch a huge amount of telly anyway, so it'll probably last yonks - we'll see.

Rob

 

[odonnghaille]

time-shifting with RAM

has anyone tried it with ram disk, i followed the manual from rc3/4 on using ram to time shift, but i could nvr successfully do it, when i entered tv, id get cant start time shifting message. I havent tried it with mp v1, before i do is it possible to achieve it.

 

[RobNorthcott]

I think some people have successfully used ramdiscs. I was tempted, but XP can't address enough memory to make it really useful (at least not the 32-bit version). I'm really happy with the way my 4GB flash drive is working now.

Rob

 

[mdbarber]

wow surprising results,
in theory fat should be faster at least on a proper hdd anyway, and would of thought TS on a flash device would wear it out fairly quickly, will check these out when i get time

 

[odonnghaille]

Cool

 

[RobNorthcott]

wow surprising results,
in theory fat should be faster at least on a proper hdd anyway, and would of thought TS on a flash device would wear it out fairly quickly, will check these out when i get time

I don't know what the difference is - the actual speed should be well fast enough anyway (normal DBT-S is about 2GB an hour, which is easily within the write speed of even cheap flash drives), but perhaps XP handles the cache better with NTFS or something. It's certainly working well on my system. Still had no stutters at all since reformatting to NTFS. Weird but very nice

I don't know how long the memory will last - just have to wait and see. It probably gets used a couple of hours a day on average. At the price of flash drives now, I don't really mind if it needs replacing every few months. So far it's been in there a couple of months, so not doing bad.

Rob

 

[kszabo]

Hi, I tried my USB-Stick also again, as NTFS frmatted. SD-TV worked flawlessly but 1080i HDTV is too much for the stick. If I test it with HDTune, it gives me ca. 10-12 MB/sec average transfer rate which is not enough for a 10-20 MBit/sec HDTV. I get heavy stutter.

strange as 1 MB/sec = 8 MBit/sec, this should be enough but in reality I have stutter. Maybe I should test a faster USB-drive.

 

[RobNorthcott]

It is odd - as you say, in theory a flash drive should be easily fast enough for the data rate of even HD broadcasts. Mine works really nicely (although I don't use HD), but lots of people report problems even with SD, so I think I'm just lucky with my particular setup. My stuff is all pretty standard, and it's a very cheap flash drive. The only thing possibly "unusual" about my setup is the nvidia motherboard chipset - could it be possible that it handles USB differently from other chipsets? (I don't know enough about it to know if that's a sensible suggestion...)

Rob