Revisiting SSDs in DVRs

Previous posts at in-koherence have been rather skeptical of using SSDs as recording storage in DVRs. SSDs have a lifespan that is largely dictated by the amount of data written to them. This may not be much of a problem if you record one or two shows a day. However many users set up recordings for series which they might watch (but for some reason never find the time to…or maybe they decided it wasn’t such a great series after all, but who has time to cancel the subscription to the series?) This is amplified if multiple members of the household set up recordings on the DVR. The next thing you know it your four-tuner DVR is recording 20 hours of shows a day. For all its faults, the good old mechanical hard drive is superior in having a write limit that’s so high that it’s generally not considered.

But with rapidly falling prices, larger capacities (with correspondingly higher endurance ratings), and the increasing difficulty of finding non-SMR 2.5″ hard drives, the time has come to give SSDs a harder look. So we took a mid-grade SSD and ran the first SSD-based Project Entangle through its paces.

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Behind the scenes at SFBayATSC

I was recently reminded that summer’s come and gone with nary a peep out of in-koherence. So just what’s been going on? Well in addition to various feature enhancements to Project Entangle, the in-koherent project SFBayATSC was rolled out in May.

SFBayATSC is actually a follow-on to a similar OTA ATSC monitoring site which was run by AVSForum member toast0. Earlier in the year toast0 gave notice that he’d be moving and that his monitoring system would be shutting down in May. The signal reception data he collected was quite useful to both viewers and broadcasters in the Bay Area, so that got us thinking…just maybe Project Entangle could fill the gap. So the signal analysis, already a part of Entangle, was beefed up, a cloud infrastructure was built, and SFBayATSC was born.

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