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RockDawg · 2010-11-14, 03:48

I have a couple different systems running XBMC around the house and both use whatever IDE hard drive I happened to have lying around. I'm wondering if a SSD is worth it for XBMC. Does it make much difference in XBMC? If so, where? I know it helps boot times, but I'm not concerned with that. Does it make a noticeable difference elsewhere?

P.S. If it makes any difference, I run XBMC Live on both machines.

**bossanova808** · 2010-11-14, 04:39

It makes a HUGE difference - obviously to boot times, but the whole system is vastly more repsonsive with an SSD in general.

It is honestly the single best XBMC upgrade you can do, if you ask me!

RockDawg · 2010-11-14, 04:58

I should add that I'm using a central mysql db and thumbs. Both are on a server in my basement. Will a SSD still make a difference?

**bossanova808** · 2010-11-14, 12:49

Yep for sure (I am using the same 'remote' mySQL setup). It's all about the snappy.

hotlobster · 2010-11-14, 13:17

Yep, standard Ubuntu Maverik boots from bios to xbmc in 15 sec with zotac HD11 and an SSD.

Just don't forget to mount your /tmp /var/log /home/user/.xbmc/temp in ram disk to avoid writing continuously on your ssd.

poofyhairguy · 2010-11-14, 22:08

1. Fast boot.
2. No heat.
3. Snappier interface

RockDawg · 2010-11-15, 02:18

OK. Thanks guys.

**bossanova808** · 2010-11-15, 04:12

hotlobster Wrote:Yep, standard Ubuntu Maverik boots from bios to xbmc in 15 sec with zotac HD11 and an SSD.

Just don't forget to mount your /tmp /var/log /home/user/.xbmc/temp in ram disk to avoid writing continuously on your ssd.

I haven't done this and after a year of solid use I notice no difference in my SSD performance - but in theory it's a good thing and would be handy so maybe you could post quick instructions on doing this with, say, XBMCLive?

teaguecl · (This post was last modified: 2010-11-20, 01:30 by teaguecl.)

bossanova808 Wrote:I haven't done this and after a year of solid use I notice no difference in my SSD performance - but in theory it's a good thing and would be handy so maybe you could post quick instructions on doing this with, say, XBMCLive?

Something along these lines should work when added to /etc/fstab (not tested!):

Code:
tmpfs   /tmp                            tmpfs  defaults,noatime,mode=1777    0 0

tmpfs   /var/log                        tmpfs  defaults,noatime,mode=0755    0 0 

tmpfs   /home/xbmc/.xbmc/temp tmpfs  defaults,noatime,mode=0755     0 0

You might also want to limit the size using something like the command below to prevent large log files from consuming all of your RAM, though I'm not sure how big a concern that is for a system like XBMC Live. The sizes I picked below are wild guesses based on what size my current directories are - they probably are not optimal.

Code:
tmpfs   /tmp                            tmpfs  defaults,noatime,mode=1777,size=1g    0 0

tmpfs   /var/log                        tmpfs  defaults,noatime,mode=0755,size=512m    0 0 

tmpfs   /home/xbmc/.xbmc/temp tmpfs  defaults,noatime,mode=0755,size=20m     0 0

Note that the "size" is the maximum size, if you have less than 1g in /tmp then it will NOT consume 1G of ram. The limit is there to protect your system in case something goes haywire and tries to write too much data into the ram disk.

**bossanova808** · 2010-11-20, 11:01

Thanks for that, much appreciated - I will give it a whirl once I do my final Dharma install.

hotlobster · 2010-11-20, 12:04

Quote:Something along these lines should work when added to /etc/fstab (not tested!):

That's exactly that, at the difference I only mount one 256 mo ramdisk in /tmp, then i symlinks /var/log & /home/xbmc/.xbmc/temp inside it.

darkscout · 2010-11-20, 18:16

hotlobster Wrote:That's exactly that, at the difference I only mount one 256 mo ramdisk in /tmp, then i symlinks /var/log & /home/xbmc/.xbmc/temp inside it.

DON"T DO THAT.

Ok, everything but the /home/xbmc/.xbmc/temp. My XBMC went into an endless booting loop. As soon as I did a umount XBMC came right up.

BoxFreak · 2010-11-20, 18:40

I´ve understood that using ram-disk slows down booting up and shutting down PC. Is this right? How about waking up from suspend, is there any effect for that?

Just wondering maybe 2GB of RAM and system on USB-disk with RAM-disk could be enough for snappy experience for ION and XBMC-Live?

hotlobster · 2010-11-20, 21:00

Quote:Ok, everything but the /home/xbmc/.xbmc/temp. My XBMC went into an endless booting loop. As soon as I did a umount XBMC came right up.

Perhaps you forgot to give the good write permissions for xbmc user ? Because there's no reason at all it doesn't work. That's what i do for months now.