SOLVED Drive Selection: Are SSDs Overkill?

[setotitan]

Hey guys building my first HTPC and had a question about storage. I'm going to be running one tower that will be for my living room TV, however my bedroom and office will also be streaming video from it, possibly at the same time. I'm debating if I'm going to run Windows Server or Linux, as the OS, so I'm open to suggestion on that. However I'm just trying to give you give background, the HTPC will be mainly for one TV but could be streaming to a total of 3 TVs at the same time from media stored on my HD. I'd always just thought I'd get a fat 1TB maybe even 2TB 7200mph hard drive and I'd be good. However looking through some builds on this site the other night and they were all designed with solid state drives! Ideally yes I'd like to be running SSDs however, for the price, I'm just wondering if it's overkill or if it's truly justifiable?

 

[jiggamanjb]

I'd say overkill. I always have multiple streams running and recording at the same time on my 2tb drive without any issue.

 

[johan851]

For a build like that I think it's overkill. Your access patterns for an HTPC don't begin to take advantage of what SSDs are good at. My guess is that a lot of the other builds like having an SSD because they're a bit quieter.

 

[setotitan]

Okay I'm getting what I thought, if you've got money to burn then go SSD but it's not a deal breaker as far as performance is concerned.

 

[jiggamanjb]

If you have the money to burn I'd just buy more 2tb drives and skip the SSD

 

[PanteraGSTK]

I use two 1tb drives for recording. One is a 7200rpm, and the other is 5400 rpm. I've never had issues unless there are multiple recordings on a single drive both with comskip processing (automatic commercial skipping) AND trying to play back a recording at the same time. That doesn't happen often and if I wasn't running comskip I wouldn't have the issue.

Think of it this way. If you are doing nothing but watching something on multiple tv's then you are just reading from the drive. Most 7200 rpm drives over 1tb read up to 120 MBps. Most recordings have a max bitrate of 16mbps. That is only 2MBps. Blu-rays go up to 48mbps which is only 6MBps. So from that you can see it would be difficult to run out of bandwidth.

 

[jimmsch]

No SSD is needed here. What is needed is a dedicated server for all of those 2B drives. Sere if you can build a nice HTPC using the AMD llano platform and find some used parts for a dedicated server to stick in your basement or something.

 

[gsrcrxsi]

i have a 60GB OCZ Vertex2 SSD as my OS drive
a 2TB WD green for dvd rips (300+)
and a 2TB WD green for recordings (HD)

i used to have a 500GB WD blue running the OS, and with the SSD the PC is a lot snappier navigating menus and coming out of sleep mode. this all on a windows 7 media center setup. for me i think it was worth it.