SSD drives don’t help dedicated Windows Media Center PCs much

I absolutely love tests like this. A lot of buzz came out when Kingston announced their very affordable 40gb OS SSD drive, designed to entice budget PC builders to move onto solid state. But with most things one would use the HTPC for, the benefits of fast read and write time just aren’t that noticeable since most items used require way more storage.

EngadgetHD

In fact we tried just about every combination we could think of from setting the SSD drive as the Live TV recording buffer, to just copying recordings to be scanned for commercials. But in the end Media Center just isn’t an application that requires much disk I/O to perform well and there really wasn’t any noticeable improvement. The real issue is that HD recordings are so big you can’t fit many of them on the drive and at 40GB, you can only hold about 5 hours of HD, so recording to the SSD until it was scanned for commercials and then moving to a spinning platter just doesn’t work.