Non-mechanical memory for buffer space?

[zhuei]

I was thinking about how my Hard drive is constantly in action since BTV is always buffering timeshifting 24/7. I figure that is going to really hurt my drive's life expectancy, and im betting if the TS buffer was on a seperate drive itd really help with performance too. So what im wondering is if theres any kind of Non-disk drive like a USB flashdrive of 2gb that could achieve the necessary transfer rates? IF so itd also be nice to cut down on noise generated by an always active HDD.

[mcowger]

1) A flash drive is still limited to about 10K write cycles - with a ring buffer, you'd kill it in a couple days.

2) Its too slow

3) As merrypig suggested, a RAM drive is a MUCH better idea.

[Jiffylush]

I was about to point out the fact that a standard ram drive is limited to 32mb.

But I decided to google it first and found this (http://www.thetechzone.com/articles/ram_drive/).

There are also solid state drives, basically sticks of ram on a pci card, a little pricey, I believe they are $400 + the price of the memory, can't find a link right now.

[DonK]

Search the forums: "ramdisk" will yield a lot of information for you.

FYI: Ram disks are not limited to 32mb. That's an old limitation and isn't an issue anymore.

I use Superspeed Ramdisk XP 512mb ramdisk and it works beautifully. Speeds up livetv response also and doesn't thrash my hard disk.

[rafisher]

Back to your original post - I assume you know that 24/7 timeshifting can be turned off?

[Crooze]

I also had the same concern for my hard drive. So I decided to use a ram disk for the time shift folder. It works great. I use Ram DiskXP creating a 512mb drive.