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I have a HTPC that occasionally locks up for a couple of seconds while playing video. I currently have two normal hard drives in there, one for OS and the latest videos we're watching and a second for archiving the videos to. The lock-ups are annoying enough for me to look at upgrading at least one of these to a solid state drive. If I was to upgrade one, which would give me the best performance improvement - moving the OS to it, or storing the videos on it?
dlanod
Posted 2011-05-18T10:28:41.580
Reputation: 454
1I don't think a SSD will help you with your problem, those "lock-ups" are usually caused by the software. – Michael K – 2011-05-18T10:34:15.330
1I have a feeling it's not the harddrive that's the issue. I think it's more likely that you're short on RAM, which is much cheaper to upgrade. – MBraedley – 2011-05-18T10:35:32.533
how much RAM does the system have? (and what's the speed of the RAM if you know it?) – tombull89 – 2011-05-18T10:37:17.043
3 GB of RAM - unfortunately this is not upgradeable as my motherboard won't boot with more RAM (sad but true, it's a hand-me-down from a cheap Acer desktop). I'm not sure of the speed but it's definitely DDR2. I'm using Windows Media Centre as the player of choice, if that makes any difference. – dlanod – 2011-05-18T10:42:24.013
2@dlanod What OS? The Resource Monitor in Windows 7 should help isolate the bottleneck (CPU, hard-disk, memory, or network). Also, it would be a waste to use an SSD for (mostly) static data - SSDs excel at random reads/writes and should significantly improve performance when used as the OS drive. – sblair – 2011-05-18T11:34:15.903
1Use it at the OS drive... even if you can't put more RAM in it having an SSD for swap will give some minor preformance increases, particularly while playing video. However I do agree with everyone else here chances are it's a CPU or RAM bottle neck. – Supercereal – 2011-05-18T12:43:51.900
I'll just jump on the 'this doesn't sound like a drive speed problem' bandwagon as well. – Shinrai – 2011-05-18T14:14:50.433