Hello community!
I was thinking about replacing my actual 2,5" HDD by a 32 Gb Class 10 SD Card, since I barely use space on disk as my stuff is on a network location.
1. Do you guys recommend to use an SD card instead of the HDD? I was thinking more about power consumption, wanted to take it to the lowest demand + less noise + less heat into the enclosure.
2. Will XBMC + Ubuntu run properly on an SD card? I use a MSI E350ia-e45 hardware.
If all the above is viable, I found this as a nice, small solution:
http://tinyurl.com/73t6cdo
Suggestions?
Welcome to the XBMC forums.
If you are going to replace an internal 2.5" HDD, why not replace it with an SSD instead of an SD card? You'll still benefit from a solid state storage device (power + noise + heat factors you cited), plus you'll get much better performance, storage capacity and longevity than you would with an SD card + card reader.
Thanks 'artrafael' !
Yeah, I thought of that solution, but an SSD is at least 64 Gig and much more expensive than the SD card solution.
Considering that I have no contents on it more than the OS and configs I consider an SSD as a waste of money, even more in my country, where the smallest SSD drive would be around 250 U$D.
Do you think that performance will be affected by using a card reader?
Thanks!
You might want to also look at CF cards as an option, as they are generally much faster than SD cards. However, for XBMC, a lot of people say they don't notice any slowdowns with a class 10 card.
USB is faster than the class 10 card, so the card reader won't slow it down.
Will give it a try. Actually the reader is a SATA one, so if a bottleneck at all, it shouldn't be there.
Thanks!
If you are planning on using an SD card to run XBMC off of and you don't plan on doing much other with the box than running XBMC, why not give openelec a try? It's a distro pretty much designed to be run from flash memory and does it quite well. In fact, I have 2 setups like that and I found no noticeable difference between an SD card and an SSD, even with machine bootup (which is why I removed the SSD on the one machine to put to better use).
I've run Ubuntu off an SD card too with usable results but with Ubuntu being a bigger install, bootup was noticeable.