Minimum Live TV Drive?

[Satori]

I was thinking of moving the live TV directory to a SSD. I record HD at about 7gb per hour. I am guessing the minimum size would be about 30gb just in case I watch a 4 hour show?

Or does PVRx2 switch to a new file every hour in which case it would be about 8gb?
What happens if I pause something and the drive fills up?

[pBS]

hmmm, no real gain in doing that...waste of a good ssd..
instead, make a 30g partition and just put tv dir there and you'll be good..
having instant seeks on a sequential file doesn't make much sense..
the file won't get restarted if you run out of room,so it has to be able to hold entire show or it just stops..
personally i've never gone past 24g on a show,even 4+ hr football games in 1080i, so 30g should be fine..
i usually put that partition on c drive's drive, just as another partition to avoid fragmentation..and to keep it out of recording drive's way..

so timeshift and recording would be on separate drives..

[Satori]

Thanks I appreciate the feedback.

[mvallevand]

I don't think it's an issue either. I could easily have the most fragmented drive of any GBPVR (3+ years old, never defragged 250GB, with only 4-20GB free) and I don't have any trouble with HD livetv on the PC or PCH.

Martin

[whurlston]

SSD for TV is a waste. I actually run LiveTV and Recordings on the same drive and I can have up to 4-5 HD shows recording/timeshifting at once. I do run Auslogics defrag nightly but it's not usually fragmented very badly. Having 64K clusters helps as well if the drive is only being used for recording (ie: no small files being written to it).

[pBS]

you'd be better off using it for the windows drive, where fast seeks will help..[tho not even much there as pvr's don't use windows that much]
or as your gbpvr drive, as it's db and file/skin access will benefit..

[Satori]

It's really a non issue. I have an SSD for my C drive and have 9gb of extra space so I thought I would just move the live directory there. I figured why not if it wasn't going to get too big if PVRx2 switched files at 1 hour. It is clearly too small though I wouldn't want to run out of space and crash the system.

[mvallevand]

9 GB isn't enough, especially since there's no guarantee that the file will be deleted on the hour, sometime for various reason it might take a reboot, but you also have to factor in pausing or rewinding live tv. Why bother putting yourself at risk like this for so little gain?

Martin

[Satori]

Yes you are exactly right.

[86atc250r]

As mentioned before - there's probably nothing to be gained ---- however, the constant large amounts of writing will definitely eat into the SSD's limited write cycle life.

Put the video on a mechanical drive and save the SSD for the OS -- the SSD should last practically forever barring a problem with the controller or other electronics if you don't write to it much.

FWIW, anyone on the fence about SSDs - don't be, the improvements are staggering. It used to literally take Visual Studio 30 seconds to start on my laptop - it takes roughly one second now. Better yet - while in visual studio working on a reasonably sized project, occasionally VS would hang sometimes for minutes while the drive cranked away for no good reason (plenty of ram) really breaking one's concentration. That doesn't happen anymore either. Sometimes VS would take 5 minutes or more to close if it had been open a long time. I think the longest I've waited now is about 5 or so sec.

~10 seconds from the end of POST to a usable desktop, 3~4 second photoshop startup (cpu limited). Instant office app startup. No more waiting on anything - easily the best upgrade I've ever done on any laptop I've ever owned. I've had mine for 8 months now - WELL worth the $300 I paid, many times over. With this being the first generation of the technology, we've got good things in store.