Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[zydeco]

I’m in the process of extending my JRiver set-up to include TV recording. My question relates to the best option managing TV recordings – is it for these to be recorded direct to a NAS or to a dedicated SSD on the HTPC? The first thought was that the NAS was the best option but – whilst I’ve got a gigabit switch / router / network – I’m worried that this might congest the home network which is also used for VoIP and streaming. What is the general recommendation at this point in time?

[Edit: I'm using a PCIe tuner card not a network tuner]

[JimH]

I wouldn't use an SSD or a NAS.  Either would work, but a large spinning local drive might be simpler.

[mwillems]

I currently record from my server PC to my NAS which is connected to a gigabit switch, and have no issues to speak of (very occasional artifacts, but that's normal with my cable stream in general).  I do have a network tuner, though, so some amount of network traffic is required in my case.

If you do a lot of recording or streaming at the same time you might eventually eat up a gigabit of bandwidth, but that's a lot of simulataneous streaming/recording.  A Bluray maxes out around 50mb/s, and HD TV recordings are typically much lower bitrate than that.  So even fencing off a few hundred megabits for overprovisioning, you'd need a lot of simultaneous streams to hit that limit.  You'd probably hit a hard drive i/o bottleneck in the NAS (from all the thrashing) before you exhausted the Gigabit connection.

All that said, there's no hard and fast reason not to record to the SSD unless you don't have much space.  It will cause a lot of writes to the SSD (as the recording directory is also the timeshifting directory, and time-shifting is mandatory while watching live).  That matters because SSD's do have a limited number of writes, *but* most of the consumer anxiety about limited writes on SSD's has proven to be overblown, see e.g. https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead .  Based on that and other similar experiments, it looks like you're far more likely to see a modern SSD die of old age before it exceeds its write limit.  The only real issue with writing to the SSD is that you have to actively manage the disk space (or script something), unless you have a terabyte SSD or something.

But Jim's right, a large local spinning drive is probably the easiest/safest solution.

[zydeco]

Thanks for the quick responses. Is the recommendation for a hhd - over a ssd - just based on longevity? Or is there some performance issues with ssd? [My preference is for ssd as less moving parts / noise / electrical noise but not if this won't work well.]

[adlelare]

zydeco, i use a Samsung 850 SSD for Win 8.1 and various applications, i have 6 HDD's that i use for recording TV, etc. and then storing. an hour of HD OTA TV is about 8 gigs, so you can fill a 120/250gb SSD in no time, and i've found streaming from an HDD to anywhere in my house (wired or wireless) is just fine. so an SSD is just too expensive and too limiting IMO. I record probably 3 hours of TV a day.  load your HTPC with lots of HDD's (mine spin at 7200 rpm, 64 mb, no raid (as i see no great advantage for what i do)) i back up important stuff (family pics etc.) to the Inet and really don't care if i lose recording of The Tonight Show, etc. if an HDD crashes. if you need to transcode (say to playback video on a tablet via Gizmo) you need a good current CPU but my TV's are all attached to PC's/laptops (some using Athlon 2 core 2.2gig machines) so they just play the files direct from main HTPC. hope this helps.

[astromo]

Good, thought provoking discussion.

I've not given it too much thought and effectively defaulted to recording TV to local HDD. That was based (in hindsight) on simplicity and GB/$.

Anything that goes to NAS is done by a copy process following recording. That's because I'd typically trim the video and cut out ads. That's done locally on the HDD.

[DeepPurple23]

I have a SSD on my computers for the OS and my games.  I do not use it for any overly active programs.  I have not had problems with any of them and have been using them for years, however, I would not use a SSD for recording TV, I think it would just shorten the life span and if your wife is anything like mine, when she loses her DVR'd shows... It is solely MY fault. 

Let us know how it goes.