[mythtvnz] mythtvnz Digest, Vol 21, Issue 38

[Sam Hadley-Jones]

>>I would suggest using a 16Gb or 32Gb Compact Flash card with an IDE
> adapter.
>>Saves gluing it all together.
> 
> Although... thinking about it more.
> 25watts running 24 hours a day is about $54 of power a year.
> That means you have to spend less than $54 to get a payback within one
> year.
> More than a year and SSD's will probably have doubled in capacity and
> halved in price.
> 
It would really be the saving of 12W from the single 250GB Seagate spinning
all the time as the system drive so that equates to only $27 annual savings
- so I'm not really saving many trees. 4x 8GB USB flash sticks could be
delivered for $130 all up. The cheapest 32GB solid state drives are just
over $200 but the main problem is my 6 SATA ports are quite valuable.
Having a rethink, a pair of 16GB CF cards in a CF to IDE adaptor would give
me 40MB/s in RAID for about $180.

I think that solid state storage should increase stability in Live TV a
lot. I still get the odd freeze up from mythtv expiring stuff between shows
while watching - even with slow deletes turned on, XFS for a file system
and a big array. Having storage with an access time in the microseconds
should solve that.

> I would tend to hold on and spend that $54 on the power to maintain your
> status quo and wait till solid state drives come down a bit more in price
> and expand in size.
> 
Flash memory has started to plateau, just like hard drives did a couple of
years ago. It used to be that I'd buy only the storage that I currently
needed but since bulk storage has stayed around the $0.20/GB for so long,
it makes sense to buy for other reasons like RAID structure, etc. Also,
with the global economic down turn, I don't think solid state storage is
going to be cheap in the near future.

> Then you can replace all your hard disks with SSD's, spend a lot less
> money, get more capacity and also reduce your power bill from that point
> forward.
> 
Are you saying I should replace my 2TB array with solid state "next year"?
Solid state drives are currently 27 times the price of spinning drives. How
much do you predict this $10,000 solid state array will drop in the next
year? :)

> $54 does not buy a lot of hardware right now that is going to really give
> you the capacity you are likely to need over the next 2 to 3 years and
you
> will probably find yourself running out of space and needing to spend
more
> money than what you will save in power over that period of time.
> 
> Toby
> 

Sam.