Wednesday, September 22, 2010

SSD Drive for HTPC – Is it Worth It?

OCZ Agility 2 OCZSSD3-2AGT240G 3.5

I put this question up on Twitter today and thought I’d expand on it.

Twitter SSD Question

I’m considering switching out my OS hard drive on my Home Theater PC with a new Solid State Drive (SSD).  In response to my twitter question I received several responses saying things like:

Andy from MissingRemote said: Using an SSD for the OS drive. Good way to reduce heat/noise while increasing UI performance

Mikinho from MissingRemote said: Same here. Low noise, heat and power usage. Faster UI, cache retrievable damn near instant and very fast resume from sleep.

Vinylfreak said: Im using two 30gb OCZ Vertex drives striped for my HTPC OS. Its very snappy. Ive been Very happy with the performance so far. =)

There were several other positive responses as I expected.  My guess is that most if not all of these HTPC enthusiasts have a SSD drive on their HTPC – used for playback.  My HTPC that I would put the SSD in is a powerhouse HTPC server.  In other words it does ALL of the recording, commercial detecting, transcoding, Blu-ray ripping etc.  But not a lot of media playback since my nice, new SageTV HD300 extenders handle that so well.

So is it still worth it to put an expensive SSD drive as the operating system drive of the HTPC server that doesn’t get used a lot for playback?  That is the question.  Thanks for your input!