We had a chance to
play with the Kingston 40GB SSDNow and of course we just couldn't wait to see what kind of magic it could work for our dedicated
Windows 7 Media Center PC. The bad news is the answer is, not much. In fact we tried just about every combination we could think of from setting the SSD drive as the Live TV recording buffer, to just copying recordings to be scanned for commercials. But in the end Media Center just isn't an application that requires much disk I/O to perform well and there really wasn't any noticeable improvement. The real issue is that HD recordings are so big you can't fit many of them on the drive and at 40GB, you can only hold about 5 hours of HD, so recording to the SSD until it was scanned for commercials and then moving to a spinning platter just doesn't work. Now if the SSD was 120GB or bigger, then in this likely scenario we could avoid the UI lag that we experience if we try to record five HD shows at once while playing back one and
scanning two for commercials. But at the current price of large SSD drives and frequency of that scenario, it just isn't something we think is worth the money right now.
posted December 3rd 2009 1:55PM
A real shame. I mostly use my Windows machine for Windows Media Center and I was hoping than an SSD would help out in some way. Then again, it's not like it really was that slow to begin with.
Could you check and see if it improved Vista Media Center at all? It'd be interesting if Windows 7 really makes such a difference that software can improve without spending more on hardware.
@Jeff Kibuule
I don't know what you mean about "at all." I mean I'm not sure what else I can say other than I didn't notice any appreciable improvement in Media Center. I suppose I should've have mentioned that I don't use media center for playing music or looking at pictures, only watching recorded TV and movies.
@Jeff Kibuule
Actually SSD's will improve lots of things in Windows Media Center like:
1. Trickmode performance - especially when you bring up preview by holding down skip with Windows 7
2. Thumbnail generation in galleries - this is lightning quick even when you have 10,000 albums
3. Cell navigation in the guide
4. Library navigation
5. Scanning through any metadata in the 10' UI
@Discoducky
But doesn't most of that assume that your media content is on the SSD as well? At 40GB, most of your stuff is going to be on a separate drive that is 100-200x bigger but still a platter-based HD. People won't be recording HDTV or storing music on an SSD in a media center for quite some time.
@Discoducky
I disagree.
I noticed NO improvements in trick play which is the main thing I was trying to achieve.
I also didn't notice any improvement in navigating the guide.
And I don't even know what navigating meta data means, but I can tell you that looking through my list of recorded TV felt exactly the same.
Now let me be clear. There aren't any SSDs big enough to hold all my recorded TV programs, so of course navigating my recordings didn't get any faster by using an SSD for my system partition. But I did try moving the live TV buffer to the SSD and of course by default the guide data is stored on the system drive and I can tell you that it made no improvements.
@(Unverified) Recorded TV thumbs are generated and not cached the same way as Music and photo libraries - so you will not see a huge improvement using a SSD for TV.
@Jeff Kibuule
>> But doesn't most of that assume that your media content is on the SSD as well?
No - the user accts and Media Center indices/ image caches are stored on the sys drive. You can browse to the usr dir and see the index file and image cache of all the album art for ex. It's a rather large file, ~500MB or more. So regardless of where you media is, a SSD drive for your sys drive is great for large libraries.
@(Unverified)
I see what you are saying, but have to say I didn't notice any improvement. I'll specifically test for this on both my extenders again and let you know if I make a correction to the post.
The SSD should not speed up MCE. If it does then something in the design of MCE is broken. Any PVR should be very much a sort of well tuned database application where it doesn't have to do "full scans" or the equivalent given the underlying storage technology. If the db schema or flat files are so crudely designed that you need an SSD to tune things than things are badly broken.
No one has that many movies or mp3s.
Whoever wrote this did not really do any real tests to make such an assertion. From real world use - SSDs make a *huge* difference on Win7 Media Center PCs, especially when used with large Music libraries. Furthermore, he did not even touch on extenders, this is where I've seen SSDs help the most - in connect time, and usability when traversing large libraries, esp music. All the of the extender user accts and images are cached to the system drive, so just having a SSD for a sys drive is a *huge* improvement for Media Center if you have large music libraries or what extenders to connect very quickly...
@(Unverified)
Whoever wrote this comment didn't bother to read the post. The review was about a 40GB SSD, no one is going to store many songs on a 40GB drive, nevertheless a "large music library." And as far as my setup, I only use extenders as my Media Center is headless and I can tell you that for watching TV this SSD didn't make any noticeable improvements.
>> Whoever wrote this comment didn't bother to read the post. The review was about a 40GB SSD, no one is going to store many songs on a 40GB drive, nevertheless a "large music library."
@(Unverified) I think you fail to understand how Windows / Media Center works at the OS / user acct / ext level, or did not read the comment totally. All the accts and music (video, ...) indices (and image caches) are stored on the system drive. This is what takes so long to load regardless of where your music is - so yes the large music library would be on a sep media drive, but it's the index file and image cache on the sys drive that is the bottleneck. i.e. a SSD drive is a huge perf improvement for Media Center with large libraries. The ext connect time (360 for ex) is also quite nice. i.e. close to the instant on you'd want - rather than waiting 30 secs to connect.
Well if you are using it as an HTPC I can think of one major benefit....Windows load times. I am planing on building a HTPC with RAID 0 SSDs to greatly increase Windows load times. I've witnessed a friends computer in a similar configuration boot into windows in 10-15 seconds and since my TV takes like 7-10 seconds to warm-up i could actually have my HTPC boot up and shut down with my TV.....my server handles recording, of which i do VERY little (more of a torrent man myself) so i dont need my HTPC on when im not using it
@hawler
I leave my Media Center on 24x7 so improved boot times are of no benefit to me.
@hawler
the noise and heat levels are also very important factors
@acme64
If you had a media center box in your living room, like I do, you probably won't notice any difference in noise and heat compared to a standard HDD. Even my Sony DirecTivo box had what I would call a "loud" fan on it and I only heard it when it was at night and everything in the house was turned off.
What about the sound of silence? I'm looking forward to putting an SSD in my HTPC to get rid any noise.
My Win7MC maxes out at about 60GB of used space because I have any shows I want to keep automatically transfered to my WHS with PP3 in another room.
Give me a 128GB SSD for < $100!
What is being used to record 5 shows at once? my card only supports 2 but even then I can't even watch a DVD. I haven't done full testing but it seems that it's simply because the HDD is in such heavy use (HDD light constantly on, not solid but almost), since my tuner handles most of the work and not the CPU. I would think a dedicated OS drive would solve this issue. I also have a large music library and it takes awhile for all the album images to load, if an SSD helped that it would certainly be worth the cost.
@(Unverified)
I have a dual tuner HDHomeRun, a USB ATSC tuner, a PCI ATSC tuner and a USB Digital Cable Tuner, and have always used a separate drive for my Recorded TV.
I agree noise would be the major factor .. my XPS420 had 3 Raptors in Raiod 0 .. but it was starting to get louder everyday .. so i got a Intel 80GB G2 SSD when Newegg had them for $214 on Black friday and i love it cant wait to get another one
I'd like to see this tested with plug-ins such as Media Browser and MyMovies. Right now, I use a 5400RPM 2.5" laptop drive for my HTPC (really, really small case) and initial loading of posters and backdrops take quite a while. That's considering I have a somewhat smallish library as I'm still in the process of ripping my discs.