SSD wear?

[Joram]

In this and age, it's difficult if not impossible to find a new computer with a spinning hard disk for its main drive. At the same time, we are cautioned that solid-state drives can take only a certain amount of read-write cycles before they can no longer be written to, only read from.

Should a NextPVR user be looking to put the Live TV buffer and recorded shows on a secondary HDD, or is this not really a concern?

[Bobins]

I've been using solid state drives in my NPVR for years and it's not been a problem so I would say not a concern.
My caveat to that would be if your recordings are important to you, always have a backup policy in place.
SSDs whilst generally reliable can still fail just like HDDs.
In my case recordings get backed up daily to a large capacity HDD in my NAS.
I've only ever had to use the backups once and that was because of finger trouble. Someone in my house (not mentioning the wife) accidentally deleted the top recordings directory with all recordings instead of the intended individual recording sub-directory.

Ray

[Joram]

I've been using solid state drives in my NPVR for years and it's not been a problem so I would say not a concern.
My caveat to that would be if your recordings are important to you, always have a backup policy in place.
SSDs whilst generally reliable can still fail just like HDDs.
In my case recordings get backed up daily to a large capacity HDD in my NAS.
I've only ever had to use the backups once and that was because of finger trouble. Someone in my house (not mentioning the wife) accidentally deleted the top recordings directory with all recordings instead of the intended individual recording sub-directory.

Ray

Thanks, it's good to know that you've been able to run SSDs for NPVR for such a long time without a problem. One less thing to think about as we slowly transition from Windows Media Center to NPVR.

Though we have many TBs' worth of saved shows, the only programs we've made sure to back up are "ancient" series we love, like the Outer Limits and the Dick Van Dyke Show.

LOL on the "someone in my house" incident! 

[bgowland]

I think Ray hit the nail on the head and it depends on your PVR use and requirements.

I built a new PVR from scratch early last year and the mobo I chose has space for 3 NVMe SSD so that was a no-brainer to use at least one for something. There's only me and my wife and we've previously had a cable TV contract with a 1TB TiVo and it never really went over 70% capacity (mostly 50%) - we mostly record, watch and delete.

The case for the new machine also has a slot for a 2.5in drive so I bolted a 500GB SSD in there for OS (Linux Debian) and NextPVR system - I also set the Live TV buffer directory there but neither of us use NextPVR for live tv. I bought a 1TB NVMe SSD purely for recordings - after about 8 months use it's around 40% capacity. The case also has space for a couple of 3.5in drives so I put in a 4TB HDD for archiving any recordings I want to keep.

I have contingency plans - if the 500GB drive fails it's fairly easy to reinstall Linux and NextPVR. If the NVMe SSD shows signs of data integrity loss I'll put in another and salvage what I can.

So it comes down to what you need, how you use it and your recovery plans.

Cheers,
Brian

[Joram]

Brian, that's a very nice system you have there!

In our case, we're looking at a more modest setup for the time being. WMC on a Windows 7 tower remains our main media system and there isn't a lot of space around the TV set for a second computer, so it'll have to be a laptop so long as we keep WMC in use.

Given that it's a laptop, storage consists of a single 512GB NVMe drive plus whatever HDDs we end up connecting to it via USB. Hence my initial worry about the SSD running out of write cycles if it's used to play live high-def TV for hours a day. But from what I hear, fortunately that looks to be OK, and we could always put the Live TV buffer on one of the USB drives.

[mvallevand]

My Vista server that I still use for v4 testing has been on SSD for a decade. When V5 was released I got a new development machine i5 gen 8 machine with NVME and I do heavy work on and lots of testing recording s dual booting Windows and Linux often. I have since migrated the same NVME to a new i5 gen 14 (not a simple Windows migration BTW). The Samsung app is still showing the status as good with 60TB written.

In that time period I had a NAS (WD) hard disk fail and just a month ago my production NextPVR server's (Seagate) HDD failed and both were written to far less often then the NVME.

I guess the bottom line is backup regardless of your choice.

Martin

[Joram]

Thanks Martin, that makes a lot of sense. Frequent backups are the solution to many problems.

You still have a Vista system? Cool!