SSD and Streaming Video

[squick3n]

Goal: Ensure that streaming video isn't being written to my SSD

To start with, I am not paranoid or anal about keeping writes of my SSD. It's there to be fast, and I want programs to use it. That said, I've got a special usage scenario that probably isn't a good idea to have the writes going to the SSD

I'm talking about streaming video. Specifically, streaming 8 GB movies from Amazon Prime and Netflix. Or, come September, using my Sunday Ticket To Go package and streaming 6 hours of NFL games over my PC. These are writes I do not want made to my SSD.

So how do I ensure that the streams are not buffered or cached somewhere on my SSD? I've read the guides about disabling disk cache in FF, or moving Temp folders for IE to a RAMDisk. But I've also read that browsers write to folders that aren't "cache".

I tried an experiment with FF and a RAMDisk. I moved the cache to the RAMDisk (and verified all the proper folders were created). I also disabled memory caching (to make sure all writes were to RAMDisk).

I then streamed an HD movie from Netflix, and paused it and let it fully buffer. I then checked the RAMDisk, and it was only 6 MB in size. So clearly that movie was buffering somewhere other than RAM or RAMDisk.

What do I need to do to make absolutely sure that streaming video never hits my SSD? Thanks for any help

 

[Blain]

Don't watch any streaming content if you don't want buffering to your HD.
Or you could avoid any buffering to your HD by using a Roku player.

 

[Phil L]

I don't know how you might do that, but I do not think you need to worry about writing even hundreds of GB to your SSD either.

NANDs are quite durable. (http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm/) These SSD are have endured tens~hundreds of TiB written with no sign of data corruption.

Furthermore, research like http://www.usenix.org/event/hotstorage10/tech/full_papers/Mohan.pdf suggests that SLC NANDs can last up to two orders of magnitude longer than expected just from the manufacturer listed p/e cycles when used in an enterprise environment. Although commercial products we buy use MLC NAND, so the improvement may not be as great, but the chances are your personal usage will also be far less demanding than those in an enterprise environment, and definitely far less than the torture test done.

In other words, your SSD is more likely to fail from faulty parts, firmware issues, compatibility problems, than it is to suffer from write wear. So I would suggest you to just enjoy your movies & footballs.

Just a thought,

 

[Emulex]

i use an x25-v and keep the media center buffer on it. no problems man. in 3-4 years? maybe - maybe not but i'd bet a 40gb sata-2 SSD isn't going to be worth much in 3-4 years.

 

[squick3n]

Thanks for the replies. I guess I'll monitor the writes in SMART and see how bad they are. Worst case, I'll make a dual-boot Linux install and use that for Sunday Ticket.