SSD in PVR?

[desjars]

Hello, anyone tried to replace the HD in a SA8642 PVR with an SSD? Just wondering if wear levelling would be an issue without TRIM support from the Scientific Atlanta OS (SARA)?

 

[adampower]

Why?

 

[sminlal]

The lack of trim will hurt the write performance of the drive over the long term, but I wouldn't expect a particular impact in drive longevity. I'd expect it to be more of a performance issue than a longevity issue. The transfer rates in PVRs are very low, so as long as the SSD has a good controller that doesn't "stutter" like some of the early ones did there shouldn't be a particular problem.

But SSDs are extreme overkill for that kind of application. The reason you pay such a big price premium for an SSD is to get the spectacular performance that it's capable of - but a PVR never needs anything close to that level of performance. A "green" hard drive would be much cheaper, could store a LOT more video, be just as quiet as an SSD, and have fairly low power consumption. And in a PVR you wouldn't see any particular difference in performance.

 

[desjars]

Thanks sminlal. The rationale for this was to reduce the noise. The PVR is in the bedroom, and the drive is constantly spinning up and powering down, to the point it interferes with our sleep. Just can't seem to get used to it. My thought was to put a small, cheap SSD into the box for the OS, and move the HD into an enclosure (connected to the Firewire port) and put it on the floor behind the dresser, where the noise will be much less intrusive. However, if a "Green" HD is as quiet as an SDD, perhaps I'll try that first.

 

[nukemaster]

Have you considered a laptop drive in something like the silent drive or quietdrive.

http://www.scythe-usa.com/product/hdd/008/sqd251000_detail.html

Laptop drives are at least as fast as old PVR drives now days.

My issue with a SSD in PVR is a simple one. There is a limited number if write cycles. Now a PVR is ALWAYS time shifting when in use. This eats a lot of write cycles(and the SSD writes full blocks at a time). I know they have a leveling setup to reduce this strain, but still.

Some mechanical hard drives can have AAM enabled to seek quieter. this increases latency, but a pvr generally writes sequentially anyway. so thats not an issue.

One last word of warning, new drives with 4k(advanced format) sectors may not operate right in a PVR. So do not get some of the newer 2000gig green drives.

Seagate has one that is supposed to be self correcting allowing 4k sectors and work on anything, but there are high failure rates reported(i have one for backup and so far so good, but only a week into it, and hell I only put 50 hours on my old backup drive since it only runs when backing up).