SSD and the HTPC

Forums › Home Theatre (including HTPC and EPG Collector) › SSD and the HTPC

blur

384 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 3

#89249 29-Aug-2011 16:34

Hi Guys

With solid state drives getting cheaper, I thought I might dip my toe in the water and purchase a 120GB drive to play around with. The purpose of this thread is to house my musings about this project, and to get some feedback from other users.

To date I have installed the 120GB SSD drive as the C: drive and left my previous drive as the D: drive to house the data.

With my previous setup I had a single Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB drive housing the OS and all my media. This has served me well, but the Caviar Black drives are quite noisy and run quite hot. The other thing that has me worried is that I hate the thought of all my media being on a single drive. A drive failure would be devastating as it has taken ages to put my collection together.

My goal is to have only the SSD in my HTPC with the OS, MediaPortal Application and database, and TV buffer. My media I’d like to move off to a NAS with RAID-5 (something like AllenG has done) and house somewhere other than the lounge as this would be quite noisy. The advantages that I see is that my media has redundancy due to RAID, and that I am removing noise and heat from my HTPC.

A disadvantage might be performance. As yet this has not been tested, but I’d like to know what the setup would perform like if I am say recording 2 channels in HD, say channel 1 and 3, while watching a third? Could the 1.0GB Ethernet keep with the data stream?

Any thoughts / comments would be appreciated.

My HTPC - Case Antec Fusion Remote, MOBO Intel DH67BLB3, CPU Intel Core i5-2400S 2.5 GHz, RAM 8GB DDR3 1333, HDD 120Gig Corsair Force Series 3 SSD system | WD Caviar Black 2TB data, Tuners Black Gold BGT3595 dual DVB-S/S2, dual DVB-T, Video nVIDIA GeForce GT 520, 1024MB, Sound Intel® High Definition Audio (onboard), OS Windows 7 x64

gehenna

8667 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 3883

Moderator

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#513542 29-Aug-2011 16:39

Just make sure TRIM is working, or the SSD has onboard garbage collection, and it should perform pretty well.

kiwijunglist

2983 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 135

ID Verified

#514091 30-Aug-2011 21:14

You mentioned you would run both mediaportal, the tv server and tv buffer on the htpc, therefore the ethernet speed is irrelevant if recording 2x channels on the htpc while watching a 3rd, unless u mean that you are setting the recording directory in the media server in which case I think the band width would be fine.

HTPC / Home automation (home assistant) enthusiast.

mm1352000

1149 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 95
Inactive user

#514147 30-Aug-2011 23:04

Yeah, recording to the network drive should be okay.

Transponder bandwidth is roughly 30 Mbps.
HD channel bandwidth is roughly 10 Mbps.
SD channel bandwidth tends to be < 5 Mbps.

Nothing compared to 1 Gbps. Even 100 Mbps should be fine. :)

insane

3324 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 1006

ID Verified

Trusted

2degrees

Subscriber

#514166 31-Aug-2011 02:42

On the cheap two western digital green drives (slow cheap ones) in RAID1 for media and the SSD for your OS should work fine.

I know someone who's got a crazy amount of media and uses one of these Drobo NAS devices, http://drobo.com/professional.php

blur

384 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 3

#514192 31-Aug-2011 08:13

mm1352000: Yeah, recording to the network drive should be okay.

Transponder bandwidth is roughly 30 Mbps.
HD channel bandwidth is roughly 10 Mbps.
SD channel bandwidth tends to be < 5 Mbps.

Nothing compared to 1 Gbps. Even 100 Mbps should be fine. :)

This is good info - confirms that the path that I am going down is not flawed.

Having one drive in my HTPC is bad enough, but the thought of 3 or even 4 drives spinning away would be annoying!

geekiegeek

2513 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 625
Inactive user

#514194 31-Aug-2011 08:26

Very similer to my config.

HTPC has a 64GB SSD for OS, applications and timeshift buffer and a 500GB WD Black for recording (this only spins up for recording and playback so doesnt add a lot of heat or noise).

All of my other media is housed on a server in the basement (2 x 2TB mirrors using WD black editions). I went with mirrored as onboard RAID sucks with RAID 5, especially if you try and set up 3 2TB drives :-)

I have video streamed to the HTPC and music via a Logitec Squeezebox Touch.

Quic Broadband

Move to New Zealand's best fibre broadband service (affiliate link). Free setup code: R587125ERQ6VE. Note that to use Quic Broadband you must be comfortable with configuring your own router.

timbosan

2199 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 294

Subscriber

#518542 8-Sep-2011 13:42

If you use Windows Home Server and Windows Media Centre, you can do this move automatically. I have been using this for severla months and it works very well.

Of course it means changing software, but personally I think these two project are some of Mirosoft's better ones.

hasso

76 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 19

#521572 15-Sep-2011 16:52

"...and house somewhere other than the lounge as this would be quite noisy."

My system has two Seagate 2TB green drives in it, and there's hardly any noise. The fan from my older Sony LCD 40inch TV makes more noise than the PC. These days you can make a pretty silent (and cheap) PC without resorting to moving it to the basement.