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tboooe · 2011-01-25, 00:14

I know there is a lot of people who favor using an SSD over a standard HDD in an htpc setup. My question is, what is the real world benefit/improvement? I know bootup time is faster but this is not an issue with me since I keep my htpc on all the time. I keep my media on a NAS so will the improved seek time actually matter? Please excuse me if this is a lame question but I am new to SSD and want to make sure it is worth the hassle of changing over. Thank you....

~~Robotica~~ · 2011-01-25, 00:23

The win is not with mediaplayback. It is:

silent
energy efficient
fast GUI (scrolling through library. This is the win!)

It's worth the hassle for HTPC usage.

teaguecl · 2011-01-25, 00:32

Robotica Wrote:The win is not with mediaplayback. It is:

silent
energy efficient
fast GUI (scrolling through library. This is the win!)

It's worth the hassle for HTPC usage.

Agree 100%. Silent was the key reason I switched. Energy efficiency (less heat) meant I could go fanless as well, making the whole system silent.

tboooe · 2011-01-25, 01:57

Thank you! I will give an SSD a try on my downstairs HTPC and compare it to the one i have upstairs to see if I notice any benefit.

ECEC · 2011-01-25, 15:48

I definitely saw a difference using XBMC. Skins can still be a bit stuttery sometimes, but scrolling through the library is super quick nowadays.

froggit · 2011-01-25, 23:00

Yep, an SSD inside your XBMC box will make it kick ass if you use XBMC in Library mode, as it will have to display all the fanart and poster graphics for all your movies etc. This makes navigation of your movies lightning fast.

The load time for these graphics using an SSD is so much faster compared to a spinning HDD for 2 main reasons:
1. The latest SATA II SSDs can load data at almost 300 MBytes/sec, compared to around 100 MBytes/sec with an HDD.
2. The seek time for an SSD is around 0.1 ms and for an HDD it is around 10 ms, so the SSD is around 100 times faster at seeking.

SSDs are much faster than HDDs, use less power, are silent and give off much less heat, which are all good advantages when trying to create the 'dream machine' for XBMC.

Here's a couple of articles you might find interesting:
http://breden.org.uk/2010/09/22/shuttle-...nter-htpc/
http://breden.org.uk/2011/01/15/shuttle-...ve-dharma/

Hope it helps.