NPVR with XP EWF (Enhanced Write Filter) and HORM (Hibernate Once Resume Many)

[Stuart_P]

My HTPC has a Compact flash as its OS disk on a CF to SATA adapter to keep noise and power draw down and I'm too tight to buy an SSD for the HTPC. 95% of the time the CF works great, but every now and then the limited write speed stalls the system which is not good. I looked into this and found out about the Enhanced Write Filter. It basically diverts all writes to a disk to a ram cache instead. Changes can be forgotten or committed to disk at any time by the user. Googling some more I found out it can be installed on a standard XP system, but it can be a pain (or time consuming) to set up so I thought I'd post here first to see if anyone has used it or if anyone can see any potential problems using it on a htpc with npvr.

I have already got my npvr recordings and settings on my proper hard disk (2TB WD ecogreen) with all the recordings, and I guess I could move the install directory to the HD too if I needed to.

So, Anyone tried it? anyone still using it?, anyone even heard of it???

Stuart

P.S. I know I could install XP on the HDD, but I like to keep the OS and data disks separate so that upgrades, backups, OS changes are a little less painful/dangerous.

[ga_mueller]

I have one of the original Acer netbooks with a really terrible SSD. Long pauses with the disk light on, and the computer unresponsive. Two things I did (after looking at EWF which was too messy); I use a version of XP specifically optimized for the crappy SSD's on original netbooks (TinyXP), as well as a freeware driver which sets up some RAM as a write cache for the SSD (FlashFire). I would recommend trying FlashFire alone as I believe it will solve you problems... google for both as they are easy to find.

[Stuart_P]

ga_mueller, Thanks for the recommendation for flashfire. I'll give it a try when I get home tonight. I'm already using Tiny7 on the HTPC, so will try the Win7 version of flashfire first. If it doesn't work I'll revert back to TinyXP (or even MicroXP) and flashfire, or XP and EWF if flashfire still doesn't work for me.

Stuart

[Stuart_P]

Well, I tried flashfire on Win7 (Tiny7) and it does make a difference to the general feel of the system, but it hasn't completely cured my problem. NRecord is still using far too much processor, and I think that may be part of the problem, but that is for another topic.

Thanks

Stuart