[Carcharodon]

First of all, since this is my first post, a quick introduction: I've just put together my first HTPC using an old Pentium 4 2.4 GHz and onboard Intel 865 VGA. It has enough grunt for non-HD stuff and all seems to work great except for Horizontal tearing, regardless of vertical sync settings, but I guess I can sort that with a bit of investigation. System is installed onto a live USB flash drive. The system has no HDD and takes all the media from a network drive.

Is using a live USB flash drive suitable as a permanent setup, or is this really intended for trialling the software before installing properly? I noticed in two days use I have a 50MB log file and I'm wondering if it will kill the flash drive in a short time period

Beautiful piece of software BTW! Thanks to all the developers for their great work on this.

Cheers
James

[lcapriotti]

I understand your concerns, and if you are worried about flash disk thrashing you can symlink the logfile to one of your networked drives. This way you will have a system suitable for a permanent setup.

[sinnor]

I am using a 40gig sata drive to run XBMC Live on.

1) It loads much faster (under 25sec from power on to using it)
2) You don't have to worry about running out of space on a 2gig stick etc.
3) 40 gig is cheap and I am sure it will give you a reason to upgrade one of your smaller drive to something bigger so that you can use the small drive for XBMC.

Best of luck.

[Carcharodon]

Thanks for the advice guys.

I'm thinking of doing something completely different. I've tested how many watts the HTPC is using and it ranges from mid 30s at idle to high 40s when playing back x264 vids, so I'm going to move my 750GB network share drive into the HTPC and leave it turned on permanently with it also running my samba share, ftp server and bit torrent clients. Should also be good for recording digital tv streams.

[leftkidney]

a little advice

I was watching G4 about 5-7 years ago and I think the show was The Screen Savers (now Attack of the Show) or maybe Call for Help, but it was Leo Laporte for sure and there was this guy on who had a 1GB USB drive (the biggest they had at that time so that should help date it) and it was set as the Windows SWAP file location and set the computer to work doing normal tasks like video encoding while browsing the internet ir burning a cd and so on - well after 3 hours the flash drive was dead

the problem is moat all commercially available flash memory, or products that use flash memory are guaranteed to withstand around 100,000 write-erase cycles, before the wear begins to deteriorate the integrity of the storage medium - good ones have wear leveling that helps stop a section get burned out and can increase the write-erase cycles but not by a lot - there is also bad block management or BBM but really there are not sosposta be constantly used for writing - READ ONLY is just fine, it is the writing-erasing that burns it out

then theres these slc mlc floating gate and so on

SLC NAND Flash is typically rated at about 100K cycles MLC NAND Flash is typically rated at about 5K-10K cycles SLC Floating Gate NOR Flash has typical Endurance rating of 100K to 1,000K cycles MLC Floating Gate NOR has typical Endurance rating of 100K cycles

so in short NO dont use it all the time for a permanent application

[lcapriotti]

XBMC Live is designed to minimize flash writes, and if permanent storage is not created, flash writes are only related to XBMC writes, ie system runs in ramdisk.

[topfs2]

Noteworthy is that the only thing XBMC writes is log, db and thumbs and fanart.

db, thumbs and fanart and these stuff are done so seldom I would say this is more or less the average usage of any flashdrive, ie moving files to friends and such.

log is what XBMC generates that would count as "destructive" for the flashdrive, and lets face it, even on debug version this won´t write enough to make it leap way far from everyday usage of any flashdrive.

Flashdrives don´t like when you write and rewrite on the same place on the drive and this usually doesn´t happen unless you have a journaling filesystem (which xbmc live does not for the above reasons).

All in all I would say that using a flashdrive right now for XBMC live as a permanent solution should still grant the drive years of use.
If anyone still are scared of the logs then it can to be moved to the ram by doing something along the lines of how I have my fstab on my netbook:

Code:

tmpfs /var/log/apt   tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/log       tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /tmp           tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp       tmpfs defaults 0 0

[lcapriotti]

and these lines are in place by default on the latest XBMC Live builds

[topfs2]

Oh cool!.

Then XBMC Live won´t tear the flashdrive nearly at all.

[jfatica]

I've been running off a 4 gig flash drive for about 6 months now with no issues. All my media is stored on network attached storage, but I still use the flash drive for thumbnails and what not.

Considering 4 gig flash drives can be found for under 10 bucks now, I'm not too worried about having to replace it if it fails. I do periodically make a backup of my userdata folder every so often just in case.