Everyone,
I searched a lot on this forum but i cannot find the answer to my problem. Im am running a Acer L100 as XBMCLive installation (Athlon X4 processor, 6Gb Ram Nvidia chipset, 500Gb Sata laptop disk). I have an XBMC live installation on the sata disk and all the media files are on a seperate fileserver (Cubestation 6Tb).
Since im only using about 2Gb of hdd space and since heat is a bit problem in this machine i was thinking of running XBMC off a SD card and remove the HDD.
The first problem i encouter is the speed, a SD card is so much slower then a SATA disk.
Since this machine has enough RAM, i wanted to do the following:
Installation:
- boot from a SDcard that creates a ram disk (3Gb)
- Install XBMC live on that ramdisk
- At shutdown write the ramdrive to a SD card
Boot:
- boot from a SDcard that creates a ram disk(3Gb)
- Boot XBMC live from that ramdisk
- At shutdown write the ramdrive to a SD card (for persistancy)
Is there a way to install XBMCLive on a persistant (by writing to SDcard) ramdisk?
Ties
I'd try running it of the SD card first to see if it works. XBMC has no issues running from a USB thumbdrive.
tiec Wrote:Everyone,
I searched a lot on this forum but i cannot find the answer to my problem. Im am running a Acer L100 as XBMCLive installation (Athlon X4 processor, 6Gb Ram Nvidia chipset, 500Gb Sata laptop disk). I have an XBMC live installation on the sata disk and all the media files are on a seperate fileserver (Cubestation 6Tb).
Since im only using about 2Gb of hdd space and since heat is a bit problem in this machine i was thinking of running XBMC off a SD card and remove the HDD.
The first problem i encouter is the speed, a SD card is so much slower then a SATA disk.
Since this machine has enough RAM, i wanted to do the following:
Installation:
- boot from a SDcard that creates a ram disk (3Gb)
- Install XBMC live on that ramdisk
- At shutdown write the ramdrive to a SD card
Boot:
- boot from a SDcard that creates a ram disk(3Gb)
- Boot XBMC live from that ramdisk
- At shutdown write the ramdrive to a SD card (for persistancy)
Is there a way to install XBMCLive on a persistant (by writing to SDcard) ramdisk?
Ties
Small SSD ? or
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=102462
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=85670
A small SSD would be a solution but they are filty expensive in this country (brasil) and hard to get. An SD card is just to slow.. it takes twice the time to boot from a SD on my system (Sandisk Extreme III) then it takes to boot from a sata disk. The problem is the read and write actions during boot.. a Extreme III is quite fast during JUST read or JUST write.
The methods described in the forum posts sync folders to a ram drive AFTER boot but i want to boot from the ramdrive.. i was hoping for a solution where there is a bare minimum boot from SD and then a ramdrive is created where the whole filesystem is placed in and then booted..
tiec Wrote:A small SSD would be a solution but they are filty expensive in this country (brasil) and hard to get. An SD card is just to slow.. it takes twice the time to boot from a SD on my system (Sandisk Extreme III) then it takes to boot from a sata disk. The problem is the read and write actions during boot.. a Extreme III is quite fast during JUST read or JUST write.
The methods described in the forum posts sync folders to a ram drive AFTER boot but i want to boot from the ramdrive.. i was hoping for a solution where there is a bare minimum boot from SD and then a ramdrive is created where the whole filesystem is placed in and then booted..
Something like this
http://pricespy.co.nz/product.php?p=770458 would be perfect. $80NZD = about $60USD
How about puppy linux. I believe there is a ubuntu version.
It boots from USB, CD etc and runs from RAM and writes back to the USB or HDD.
http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview%20an...tarted.htm
why not look into using openelec if you want to run from a flash drive? openelec runs quite quickly off an SD card or usb thumb drive and is pretty tiny when installed.
You can get a ramdisk to work but you need to make sure the loading of the disk is in sequence with the xbmc startup. I could only make this work by loading the disk from the xbmc start script or starting xbmc from the ramdisk script.
NB: The sequence issue was only apperant with a large library and database, it might work nicely with a remote setup-
NB2: The biggest issue with the speed is probably boot time which will not be helped by a RAM disk (will be even slower of course)
If you would like a project you could try to go diskless and pxe boot.