Thinking about SSD...

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by ccsmoke

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...ks-Utilities-*

Wow, that's a great link, thanks a ton!

[ccsmoke]

You bet!, and thank you for all your hard work for making Sage what it is today...goes with all the contributors.

When my 9 yr. old daughter can run it without getting daddy...that to me is priceless

[davephan]

Originally Posted by Naylia

1) Windows/Sage boot so damn fast!

2) Accessing network shares from HD200 is faster (instantaneous) for some reason.

Occasionally, I get the SageTV spinning circle for 30 - 60 seconds, usually at the end of a show, when pressing stop. I have 3.06 gig i-7 quad with 3 gigs of RAM. My C drive is defragmented. Maybe the boot drive or java is the bottleneck. Have you noticed any reduction in the SageTV spinning circles after switching to the SSD?

Dave

[JetreL]

Originally Posted by davephan

My C drive is defragmented.

You know you are not supposed to defrag SSD drives. You don't gain anything and reduce the life of the drive.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by davephan

Occasionally, I get the SageTV spinning circle for 30 - 60 seconds, usually at the end of a show, when pressing stop. I have 3.06 gig i-7 quad with 3 gigs of RAM. My C drive is defragmented. Maybe the boot drive or java is the bottleneck. Have you noticed any reduction in the SageTV spinning circles after switching to the SSD?

Dave

The slowness is the hdd in your computer. I'm getting an ssd just to make sage faster. I've noticed that when I go into SMW or tv explorer sage grinds to a halt quickly because of all of the pictures it is trying to access. Even the cheapes ssd will make that better. As far as making a server faster... I'll find out eventually...

It is amazing how much faster storage makes when navigating through your computer. Faster loads, startup, everything. I experienced this going from a first gen SATA drive to a new single platter drive. Huge difference.

On the WHS discussion. The new version of WHS is based off of Server 2008 and automatically backs itself up. The only down side for some of us would be the fact that it is going to be 64bit only. There are already beta's floating around out there.

[Djc208]

Originally Posted by davephan

Occasionally, I get the SageTV spinning circle for 30 - 60 seconds, usually at the end of a show, when pressing stop. I have 3.06 gig i-7 quad with 3 gigs of RAM. My C drive is defragmented. Maybe the boot drive or java is the bottleneck. Have you noticed any reduction in the SageTV spinning circles after switching to the SSD?

Dave

I imagine this won't be drastically reduced by an SSD, unless you use them for a recording drive. Since most of your recordings and media files will stay on conventional drives, access won't necessarily improve for that stuff, but it's also not really necessary.

The only real delays I see in my desktop machine is when it access the conventional HDDs where all my music, photos, etc currently are. It's a little longer because I let those drives spin down when not in use, so I'll have to wait for them to wake.

[ericscottf]

Originally Posted by davephan

Occasionally, I get the SageTV spinning circle for 30 - 60 seconds, usually at the end of a show, when pressing stop. I have 3.06 gig i-7 quad with 3 gigs of RAM. My C drive is defragmented. Maybe the boot drive or java is the bottleneck. Have you noticed any reduction in the SageTV spinning circles after switching to the SSD?

Dave

that is insane. something is wrong. when i see the spinning circle, it is for 5s at most, and always due to the fact that i tell my drives to spin down when not in use.

run a real diag program on your drives, you may have a bad sector or some such that is forcing the drive to re sync and taking a bunch of time. Your computer is more powerful than mine, there's no reason for it to run that poorly.

[ericscottf]

I've been reading up on the OCZ forums about the various things i need to to get the drive working right.
Originally, i was just going to clone my perfectly good windows XP install on to the ssd, but that looks like it would be more work to get right than a fresh windows xp install.

I'm going to do the fresh XP install, then install java/etc, then a fresh install of sage, then i'll just copy my current sage folder over the newly installed sage folder -- will this work with no problems, or will i be missing registry settings/other folders/whatnot that will cause me grief?

[JetreL]

Originally Posted by ericscottf

will this work with no problems, or will i be missing registry settings/other folders/whatnot that will cause me grief?

Generally on a new install I will:

1. Install Window
2. Patch fully
3. Install Sage
4. Stop sage server
5. Copy over Sage Directory
6. Update Java
7. Install all drivers for Capture Hardware
8. Install Playon
9. Start Sage

And that typically works for me every time. If you have comskip. Make sure it is in the same directory it was before.. There may be some tweaking but nothing that is a show stopper.

[zoundz]

Originally Posted by ericscottf

I'm happy with my setup
XP Pro
Cygwyn so i can SSH or SCP into my box and do most tasks from the command line
VNC for when i need to mess around in the gui
sage webserver for when i want to mess with sage from afar
norton ghost for backing up

Just FWIW, WinSSHD has a free for non-commercial use version and eliminates the need for all that clunky Cygwin stuff. WinSCP and Putty can both connect to WinSSHD. Additionally, although I have been a big fan of UltraVNC for a long time, I have to admit that Remote Desktop is a lot nicer for headless XP Pro operation.

Just my $.02 and, of course, YMMV.

[davephan]

It is very seldom that I see the spinning circle, but it does happen from time to time. I will have to try to determine which drives it may be related to the spinning circle.

I was hoping that a SSD might speed up SageTV. It's too expensive to use SSD for recording drives, although they do make 640 gig SSD drives, but that would really be spendy to setup a large array of those drives!

I was mainly thinking of getting the SSD drive for a general purpose computer to speed up the program launching of that computer. I also thought about testing it on the SageTV computer as a boot drive if there was some chance that the drive would speed up SageTV. It would be very easy to test by simply applying an image to the SSD.

I use a conventional IDE drive for my boot drive now that is periodically defragged PerfectDisk. I'm not sure where someone got the idea that I was defragging an SSD drive.

Dave

[Djc208]

Originally Posted by JetreL

Generally on a new install I will:

1. Install Window
2. Patch fully
3. Install Sage
4. Stop sage server
5. Copy over Sage Directory
6. Update Java
7. Install all drivers for Capture Hardware
8. Install Playon
9. Start Sage

And that typically works for me every time. If you have comskip. Make sure it is in the same directory it was before.. There may be some tweaking but nothing that is a show stopper.

Same here other than I usually do 6 and 7 before 3/4, which I usualy do in the reverse order (copy the directory then run the install like an upgrade). Same results though so I guess it doesn't matter.

You probably know this already, but since Windows XP doesn't support trim you will see a performance drop over time. Not a big change but can be noticable.

[ericscottf]

Yeah, i'm not going to be obsessively benchmarking, so i probably won't notice at all -- but if i do, the drive does support trim, so i can just run a program that will clear out the junk every so often.

So all of the STV and STVi and other things are all stored and tracked as files inside the sage dir, and not as a million registry entries that i'm about to kill?

[JetreL]

Originally Posted by Djc208

Same here other than I usually do 6 and 7 before 3/4, which I usualy do in the reverse order (copy the directory then run the install like an upgrade). Same results though so I guess it doesn't matter.

You probably know this already, but since Windows XP doesn't support trim you will see a performance drop over time. Not a big change but can be noticable.

yeah alot of my steps can me moved around as needed. I left out:

1. forget to install something
2. ask wife to stop watching her show
3. turn off HD200
4. stop sage
5. patch or install whatever I forgot
6. listen to my wife *nag* *nag* *nag*
7. start sage
8. start hd200
9. WAF goes up up up...

It's not really that bad but it sure sounds funny...

[Djc208]

Originally Posted by ericscottf

So all of the STV and STVi and other things are all stored and tracked as files inside the sage dir, and not as a million registry entries that i'm about to kill?

That's been my experience, yes.

[sandor]

So it sounds like a SageTV-only server that is up 24/7 would basically experience no increased performance from an SSD drive?

I, like many on here, only run Sage on the server, and have all media on separate drives, so it seems like SSD or HDD is a moot point for people like me?

[Djc208]

Originally Posted by sandor

So it sounds like a SageTV-only server that is up 24/7 would basically experience no increased performance from an SSD drive?

I, like many on here, only run Sage on the server, and have all media on separate drives, so it seems like SSD or HDD is a moot point for people like me?

That's my opinion, yes. It will make the computer faster, but only when the computer is accessing that drive, which on a media servier is a very small percentage of the total I/O it handles. Given the cost of good SSds I wouldn't waste the money on a server. Put it in your desktop machine instead.

[ericscottf]

___wow___

It is even faster than I was expecting.

Of course I wasn't expecting more speed out of videos -- how could i? Videos play fine off of almost any drive.

I got the SSD to speed up all the other tasks on the PC.
I am very impressed!

FWIW, i was able to clone the system so i didn't have to reinstall everything. A bit tricky, as SSDs need a specially crafted partition to eke out every last bit of speed, but definitely a time saver in the end.

[Djc208]

Yes, like going from dial-up to broadband internet, it's tough to go back to regular HDDs after having a system with an SSD. It really is just about the best upgrade you can make to a computer today.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by ericscottf

___wow___

It is even faster than I was expecting.

So, out of curiosity, what's faster? Anything in Sage?