Need advice on transcode directory

[itsrumsey 4]

Do you guys transcode on the media drives themselves or an SSD?

 

By default MB encodes to the C: drive but I gotta figure all the constant writing must be a real thrashing to the life of the SSD, so I moved the folder to my media drives instead.  Any opinions on this?

[JeremyFr79 228]

I run mine on one of my RAID5 arrays.

[strager 18]

I ran mine on an SSD for about a year before it annihilated the drive. However, I've found that even on a high end Western Digital 7200 it performs worse than it did on the SSD (I can only imagine how bad it would do on a Seagate or a 5400) with rare cases of skipping when only 3 or 4 users are streaming. I'm planning to find an old Velociraptor (a 10k RPM hard drive) to test with to see if it does any better.  Best solution I think think of outside of that is to find a cheap sub $100 SSD for trans-coding and just replace it yearly. 

Edited March 25, 2015 by strager

[Beardyname 198]

I hardly believe some writing will trash the lifetime of the ssd drive, if yours failed 2strager it was either really old, or had some sort of fault.

 

http://techreport.com/review/27062/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-only-two-remain-after-1-5pb

and finally they all died:

http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead

Edited March 25, 2015 by Beardyname

[CashMoney 94]

Beardyname beat me to it SSD lifetimes on the box are conservative estimates. Manufacturers have had to do this simply because if any drives did fail on a regular basis before the stated lifetime, there would be an uproar which would hurt the already hard sell of SSD's in general. That's not to say that they can't fail of course, even regular hard drives will have the odd one which will fail way before it's lifetime. I've got an old first gen SSD from way back when they first came out. It's been relegated to in car music drive (it's old enough it also sported a USB port) in the past few months, still running fine despite a moderately hard life. But I've also had a newer drive fail on me after a few months, and this one only had Windows on it.

 

A bit more on topic, I was testing the new Folder Sync option the other day as I run Emby Server on a Celeron. At some point I will upgrade but I was curious how well it would do converting media. It was slow, but the CPU usage was a lot lower than I expected at around 7%-15%. The Disk usage however was pegged at 100%. I almost went out to the car and got the music SSD purely to use for converting media ...

 

If it was me, I'd buy a brand name but cheap SSD, perhaps a little 60-120GB. Check the warranty/lifetime in the print; I don't believe even with heavy usage it would die anytime soon, but if dies within the warranty, send it back and get a new one. Corsair, Samsung and Crucial have great warranty and returns historically, I can't comment about the others personally but I would imagine the other top brand names would be the same.

Edited March 25, 2015 by CashMoney

[pir8radio 1312]

I use an SSD like @@CashMoney said, they are pretty cheap now days..   I run a raid 5 for my main media store, but i figured the SSD would be even faster and less stress on my expensive drives in the raid...  plus its a second path for drive activity to take.   I posted a guest account for my server if you want to see how it works, or doesn't work...  HERE

[itsrumsey 4]

I have decided to go ahead and use an SSD for the transcoding directory.

[pir8radio 1312]

I would use that SSD to cache the MB images too...   speeds the loading of the web interface.