Just ordered Ceton InfiniTV 4.

[Activate: AMD]

Haha, I'm not going to judge. If anything, <3 to you for taking the time to take some pictures for me, I owe you a beer.



PS: What case do you have? I want to watercool this new HTPC I'm planning and your case looks like it might be a suitable option...

no beers necessary, it took me only about 5 minutes The case is an Antec Fusion Remote. WC might be a pretty tight fit, but heres a slightly wider shot to give you a better feel for the size (taken before the ceton was installed):

funny, or not... i cannot screw my ceton in either. it unseats it from the PCIe slot when screwed in.

i wonder if this has been reported to them, they have bad PCI brackets?

Weird, I thought maybe it was just my case. I think the bracket is a little bit too long, so that the tab at the bottom of the bracket hits the case before the connector is fully seated. I'll have to play with it a little more, maybe a little cutting action will be called for.. but then again, its not a huge deal

 

[Adidas4275]

no beers necessary, it took me only about 5 minutes The case is an Antec Fusion Remote. WC might be a pretty tight fit, but heres a slightly wider shot to give you a better feel for the size (taken before the ceton was installed):



Weird, I thought maybe it was just my case. I think the bracket is a little bit too long, so that the tab at the bottom of the bracket hits the case before the connector is fully seated. I'll have to play with it a little more, maybe a little cutting action will be called for.. but then again, its not a huge deal

I thought the same thing, that is was my $40 ebay 4u case.... but then i saw your post

cutting with a dremel might work

 

[Machupo]

didn't have any seating issues w/ my sugo-06. we'll see soon how it fits in the habey 800

 

[xDezor]

I plan to upgrade it to a i7 950 using ramdisk for livetv (16gb of 24), SSD for windows, media browser & channel cache. Dual gigabit bonded (to procurve 1810). If that doesn't make it fast enough, I'll be peeved.

An SSD is going to be faster than a ramdisk. If you want overkill, 2 SSD's in RAID1 = winnar...etc, etc...

How exactly did you come to that conclusion? Please, do tell.

It sounds as though vxspiritxv is spot-on with his application; using a ramdisk for live TV is perfectly suited for this sort of task.

 

[xFROSTx]

How exactly did you come to that conclusion? Please, do tell.

It sounds as though vxspiritxv is spot-on with his application; using a ramdisk for live TV is perfectly suited for this sort of task.

A magical fairy, riding a unicorn of course, told me about it in my sleep.


I came to that conclusion, when I tested it myself. Why would I lie to a bunch of random people on an internet message board?


Here's a guide on how to setup a ramdisk for your live TV buffer.
http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/07/setting-up-a-ramdisk-scratch-drive-for-windows-7-media-center.html


And here's a forum thread for Media Browser's image cache with a guide posted.
http://community.mediabrowser.tv/permalinks/3413/ram-disk-for-mb---your-thoughts



I used to do both at sometime or another before I went with SSD's in RAID1. With my setup (Main HTPC and 3 Xbox360 extenders), I found no worthwhile benefit with using a ramdisk for the live tv buffer. I found that this is probably because a regular 7200RPM drive can keep up with 4 HD streams adequately. If you constantly have all 4 tuners in use, or if you are talking about 5+ HD streams, I could see the justification more. Despite this, given the cons of using a ramdisk, I would argue that there are better solutions if you are in this situation - like going with an SSD.

Media Browser's image cache is where I saw the biggest improvements. Image loading became almost instantaneous and scrolling lag pretty much completely disappeared. Yeah, the ramdisk can be finicky sometimes (Not auto-mounting the image was the most common glitch) and you obviously need a decent amount of ram to have a couple spare gigs for this, but considering how much smoother it made Media Browser, I though it was worth it.

In late 2009, I stumbled across Microcenter having a really good sale on SSD's and decided to treat myself as an early Christmas present. I was originally just going to pick up a 64GB drive for $180, but they had 32GB drives on sale for $85 a piece and I decided it was too good of a deal to pass up on the opportunity to RAID a pair of SSD's for fun.

It's been a year since I did my original testing so the exact details are a little fuzzy, but I was just as surprised to find that the SSD's gave me better "real world performance" than the ramdisk. What I mean by that, is that while the ramdisk" pretty much" eliminated scrolling lag, the SSD's completely eliminated it. With the ramdisk, if I held down the right arrow while scrolling through my library in Media Browser (400+ titles in coverflow w/rotating backdrops), it would occasionally pause for a 1/2 second or so and then scroll extra fast to catch up. Not a huge deal, it was literally a minor hiccup. I was surprised/pleased to find that with the SSD's, I can hold down the right arrow and scroll indefinitely smooth as butter.

Overall, I realized that this is one of those situations where benchmarks don't mean shit. There are obviously enough variables and environmental factors involved in all of this, that the pure speed of the hardware is not always the most important factor. Not to mention, the inherent cons of using a ramdisk. Like I mentioned earlier, they can be finicky at times and startup/shutdown times are noticeably slowed due to the image mounting. Considering that 16GB of ram cost about $200, vs. 2 64GB SSD's for roughly the same amount (Okay, probably closer to 225-250ish to be safe), I don't understand why you would put up with the hassles of a ramdisk when you can get more space and better performance for the same amount. With the extra space, you might as well put your live TV buffer on the SSD's as well, just in case it helps in any way (4+ HD streams going at once). Also, with the OS being on an SSD, you will see speed improvements with media center as a whole (Guide scrolling, responsiveness, etc), instead of just selected parts like you get with a ramdisk.


IMO, ramdisks are a poor man's temporary solution to gauge how much of a performance increase you can get from an SSD or SSD's in RAID1. Taking into account the higher cost of ram, extra software to configure and the inherent downsides of a ramdisk, it just seems silly to me to go this route vs. an SSD. Yeah, RAID1 runs the risk of losing your array, but I don't see how this is any more risky than having data stored in an image that get mounted/unmounted every time the computer is restarted. A good UPS with automatic shutdown software is a must, since a power outage = bye bye everything in your ramdisk. BSOD;same story. With SSD's in RAID1, I can at least mitigate my main risk with my automatic backup software.


If you still don't believe me, try it out for yourself and come to your own conclusions. Maybe I jacked up an install somewhere and that skewed my testing, who knows. I think maybe Activate:AMD or Addidas can back me up a little on this though. I know we have had discussions here in the past about SSD's in HTPC's and I thought it was one of those two that recently upgraded their OS drive to an SSD and confirmed some of my thoughts in our earlier threads.

 

[vxspiritxv]

I can't imagine that you don't have enough power already. Maybe try an Intel NIC if you think its a network issue. What kind of usage are you seeing?

Already has an intel nic, connected to a procurve 1810 with flow control off and:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile\NetworkThrottlingIndex FFFFFFFF
Cat 6 local interconnects, cat5e in the walls.

An SSD is going to be faster than a ramdisk. If you want overkill, 2 SSD's in RAID1 = winnar. I did this on my main HTPC and now it laughs at image cache loading. I have 450 something movies in media browser using cover flow and I can't get it to lag even if I try.

But I doubt your problem is with your machine's power, I bet it's your network. Unless you have a decent 16 port gigabit switch (Sounds like you have a decent amount of networked equipment in your place), I bet you are getting collision all over your network. I've found 360's to be 1 step above legally retarded when it comes to networking. I used to have issues when I had 2 switches in my network (One for each floor of my place). I reconfigured my network so everything plugged into the same gigabit switch and found my network streaming to be much smoother.

How the hell is SSD faster than ramdisk?
Just did some benchmarks (on my main rig) iometer setting 16k 50% read
ssd:

ram:

Besides liveTV buffer on ssd can't be good for it, all those writes & deletes.

Also if you want to try ramdisk yourself, this is what I'm using: http://members.fortunecity.com/ramdisk/Download/download_and_003.htm
Instructions here: http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/07/setting-up-a-ramdisk-scratch-drive-for-windows-7-media-center.html

 

[xFROSTx]

Already has an intel nic, connected to a procurve 1810 with flow control off and:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile\NetworkThrottlingIndex FFFFFFFF
Cat 6 local interconnects, cat5e in the walls.




How the hell is SSD faster than ramdisk?
Just did some benchmarks (on my main rig) iometer setting 16k 50% read
ssd:
http://www.quickesthosting.com/~spirit/b/ssd.gif[IMG]
ram:
[IMG]http://www.quickesthosting.com/~spirit/b/ram.gif[IMG]

Besides liveTV buffer on ssd can't be good for it, all those writes & deletes.

Also if you want to try ramdisk yourself, this is what I'm using: [url]http://members.fortunecity.com/ramdisk/Download/download_and_003.htm[/url]
Instructions here: [url]http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/07/setting-up-a-ramdisk-scratch-drive-for-windows-7-media-center.html[/url][/QUOTE]


Haha, it looks like you posted right after me. I said the same thing to myself when I was doing my testing. The benchmarks are dramatically different yes, but it didn't equal real world performance. At first I thought I didn't have the ramdisk properly setup or it wasn't optimized. Despite my tweaking, the ramdisk still gave me minor, occasional lag in certain situations. There's still the possibility that I screwed something up, but it's my belief now that software based ramdisks are not as effective as the benchmarks imply. This seemed to be the most plausible explanation to me because I've seen this kind of thing before. Crossfire between an onboard ATI GPU and an add-in card (I used an onboard HD 3300 with my add in HD5670), did the same thing. My benchmarks were higher, but it didn't do shit for me with real world performance. Two add-in cards in crossfire works, but the hybrid crossfire-x (Whatever ATI calls it when you crossfire and add-in card with the onboard gpu) only really improved theoretical benchmark scores vs. additional FPS in a game. I think a hardware based ramdisk would be a whole different story, but we are talking about software based ramdisks here. Given the risks and additional setup associated with a ramdisk, I believe 2 SSD's in RAID1 is a better option if you are looking for that kind of performance. Not only do I think it's more reliable, I think that if you ignore what the benchmarks say and go by how the system "feels", you would agree that 2 SSD's in RAID1 "feels" smoother and more responsive.

Again, these are just my own conclusions. Feel free to test it yourself, I haven't ran into anyone else that has done a comparison like I have between the two, so I would be curious if my "results" correlate with someone else who has also tried it.

 

[vxspiritxv]

I'm not putting cache in the in the ramdisk. So that wont matter, only LiveTV. Wont be saving/restoring anything, so shouldn't have any mounting issues.

 

[xFROSTx]

I'm not putting cache in the in the ramdisk. So that wont matter, only LiveTV. Wont be saving/restoring anything, so shouldn't have any mounting issues.

With your setup, I can see the justification with putting the live TV on a ramdisk. I don't think I was able to stress the system as much as you can, which is why I didn't see an improvement with using one for my live TV. I've also heard that putting the live TV buffer on an SSD will reduce the lifespan, but I've also heard that that is mostly hypothetical since SSD's haven't really been around long enough to draw any solid conclusions on that. Don't know why you wouldn't put the media browser cache there as well. Not very hard if you already have the ramdisk setup and it gave me a nice performance increase.

I'm confused on how you plan on getting around mounting/unmounting the image though. I mean, you have to restart eventually.


EDIT: Just to clarify, 1 SSD probably isn't going to be as fast as a ramdisk. I should have made it more clear in my initial post about SSD vs. ramdisk that I was comparing 2 SSD's in RAID1 to a ramdisk. I realize now that I dropped that ball there trying to joke around with my "Winnar" comment. My SSD's in RAID1 score about the same as the fastest hard drive listed in the link below, the Corsair Performance3, so I wouldn't exactly say that I was correct with the 1 SSD part. If you can post your settings for your IOmeter testing, I'll run it on my SSD's in RAID1 for a comparison. Also, vxSpritixv, do you realize that you linked the same guide I did? Kinda funny.


http://www.harddrivebenchmark.net/high_end_drives.html

 

[xDezor]

A magical fairy, riding a unicorn of course, told me about it in my sleep.

I came to that conclusion, when I tested it myself. Why would I lie to a bunch of random people on an internet message board?

Here's a guide on how to setup a ramdisk for your live TV buffer.
http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/07/setting-up-a-ramdisk-scratch-drive-for-windows-7-media-center.html

And here's a forum thread for Media Browser's image cache with a guide posted.
http://community.mediabrowser.tv/permalinks/3413/ram-disk-for-mb---your-thoughts

I used to do both at sometime or another before I went with SSD's in RAID1. With my setup (Main HTPC and 3 Xbox360 extenders), I found no worthwhile benefit with using a ramdisk for the live tv buffer. I found that this is probably because a regular 7200RPM drive can keep up with 4 HD streams adequately. If you constantly have all 4 tuners in use, or if you are talking about 5+ HD streams, I could see the justification more. Despite this, given the cons of using a ramdisk, I would argue that there are better solutions if you are in this situation - like going with an SSD.

Media Browser's image cache is where I saw the biggest improvements. Image loading became almost instantaneous and scrolling lag pretty much completely disappeared. Yeah, the ramdisk can be finicky sometimes (Not auto-mounting the image was the most common glitch) and you obviously need a decent amount of ram to have a couple spare gigs for this, but considering how much smoother it made Media Browser, I though it was worth it.

In late 2009, I stumbled across Microcenter having a really good sale on SSD's and decided to treat myself as an early Christmas present. I was originally just going to pick up a 64GB drive for $180, but they had 32GB drives on sale for $85 a piece and I decided it was too good of a deal to pass up on the opportunity to RAID a pair of SSD's for fun.

It's been a year since I did my original testing so the exact details are a little fuzzy, but I was just as surprised to find that the SSD's gave me better "real world performance" than the ramdisk. What I mean by that, is that while the ramdisk" pretty much" eliminated scrolling lag, the SSD's completely eliminated it. With the ramdisk, if I held down the right arrow while scrolling through my library in Media Browser (400+ titles in coverflow w/rotating backdrops), it would occasionally pause for a 1/2 second or so and then scroll extra fast to catch up. Not a huge deal, it was literally a minor hiccup. I was surprised/pleased to find that with the SSD's, I can hold down the right arrow and scroll indefinitely smooth as butter.

Overall, I realized that this is one of those situations where benchmarks don't mean shit. There are obviously enough variables and environmental factors involved in all of this, that the pure speed of the hardware is not always the most important factor. Not to mention, the inherent cons of using a ramdisk. Like I mentioned earlier, they can be finicky at times and startup/shutdown times are noticeably slowed due to the image mounting. Considering that 16GB of ram cost about $200, vs. 2 64GB SSD's for roughly the same amount (Okay, probably closer to 225-250ish to be safe), I don't understand why you would put up with the hassles of a ramdisk when you can get more space and better performance for the same amount. With the extra space, you might as well put your live TV buffer on the SSD's as well, just in case it helps in any way (4+ HD streams going at once). Also, with the OS being on an SSD, you will see speed improvements with media center as a whole (Guide scrolling, responsiveness, etc), instead of just selected parts like you get with a ramdisk.

/snip/

If you still don't believe me, try it out for yourself and come to your own conclusions. Maybe I jacked up an install somewhere and that skewed my testing, who knows. I think maybe Activate:AMD or Addidas can back me up a little on this though. I know we have had discussions here in the past about SSD's in HTPC's and I thought it was one of those two that recently upgraded their OS drive to an SSD and confirmed some of my thoughts in our earlier threads.

Haha, it looks like you posted right after me. I said the same thing to myself when I was doing my testing. The benchmarks are dramatically different yes, but it didn't equal real world performance. At first I thought I didn't have the ramdisk properly setup or it wasn't optimized. Despite my tweaking, the ramdisk still gave me minor, occasional lag in certain situations. There's still the possibility that I screwed something up, but it's my belief now that software based ramdisks are not as effective as the benchmarks imply. This seemed to be the most plausible explanation to me because I've seen this kind of thing before. Crossfire between an onboard ATI GPU and an add-in card (I used an onboard HD 3300 with my add in HD5670), did the same thing. My benchmarks were higher, but it didn't do shit for me with real world performance. Two add-in cards in crossfire works, but the hybrid crossfire-x (Whatever ATI calls it when you crossfire and add-in card with the onboard gpu) only really improved theoretical benchmark scores vs. additional FPS in a game. I think a hardware based ramdisk would be a whole different story, but we are talking about software based ramdisks here. Given the risks and additional setup associated with a ramdisk, I believe 2 SSD's in RAID1 is a better option if you are looking for that kind of performance. Not only do I think it's more reliable, I think that if you ignore what the benchmarks say and go by how the system "feels", you would agree that 2 SSD's in RAID1 "feels" smoother and more responsive.

Again, these are just my own conclusions. Feel free to test it yourself, I haven't ran into anyone else that has done a comparison like I have between the two, so I would be curious if my "results" correlate with someone else who has also tried it.

Wow, you took that a lot better than I thought. Thank you for taking the time to give a thorough explanation of your reasoning.

It is interesting, however, that you encountered issues with scrolling through the menus when using a ramdisk. I believe you that it happened, I'm just curious as to why. Maybe it was too fast, and the rest of the system couldn't process all of those images that quickly, who knows.. That would be a dealbreaker for me too. Somewhat unrelated, but I had a similar experience with my android phone; after I updated to android 2.2 I noticed that there was some sort of jittering when scrolling through my apps. Even though 2.2 benchmarked much faster, that jittering was enough for me to revert back to 2.1

Having said that, I think you made a typo with regards to which RAID version you were using. You state:

Yeah, RAID1 runs the risk of losing your array, but I don't see how this is any more risky than having data stored in an image that get mounted/unmounted every time the computer is restarted. A good UPS with automatic shutdown software is a must, since a power outage = bye bye everything in your ramdisk. BSOD;same story. With SSD's in RAID1, I can at least mitigate my main risk with my automatic backup software.

I believe you are referring to RAID0, no? I know you know this, but for those of you who don't, RAID1 offers redundancy whilst RAID0 is a spanned, single volume offering a theoretical 2x improvement in read/write performance without any redundancy.

With your setup, I can see the justification with putting the live TV on a ramdisk. I don't think I was able to stress the system as much as you can, which is why I didn't see an improvement with using one for my live TV. I've also heard that putting the live TV buffer on an SSD will reduce the lifespan, but I've also heard that that is mostly hypothetical since SSD's haven't really been around long enough to draw any solid conclusions on that. Don't know why you wouldn't put the media browser cache there as well. Not very hard if you already have the ramdisk setup and it gave me a nice performance increase.

I'm confused on how you plan on getting around mounting/unmounting the image though. I mean, you have to restart eventually.

Well, if it is as you stated, where the media browser cache "lags" when placed on ramdisk, perhaps it is best to just leave that on the SSD. Additionally, as you mentioned, your ramdisk software would have to load the cache back into your ram partition every time you reboot the system.

Are there any problems associated with putting the live tv stream on ramdisk? Would media center freak out if the partition was empty every time it started up? I suppose that would eliminate all concerns with losing your data on power loss, if it is just the live tv stream.

* I wanted to add a little disclaimer: I haven't dealt with media center in a long time, and have never personally used windows 7 media center. I still run windows media center 2005 on my HTPC so some of what I say might not still be relevant (I use MCE 2005 because I'm using firewire to digitally record from my HD STB..which is also why I'm interested in this Ceton card).

 

[shawnoen]

My CC has been charged so it should be here in a couple weeks!

Can remove my ATI internal card and ebay that sucker!

 

[xFROSTx]

Wow, you took that a lot better than I thought. Thank you for taking the time to give a thorough explanation of your reasoning.

It is interesting, however, that you encountered issues with scrolling through the menus when using a ramdisk. I believe you that it happened, I'm just curious as to why. Maybe it was too fast, and the rest of the system couldn't process all of those images that quickly, who knows.. That would be a dealbreaker for me too. Somewhat unrelated, but I had a similar experience with my android phone; after I updated to android 2.2 I noticed that there was some sort of jittering when scrolling through my apps. Even though 2.2 benchmarked much faster, that jittering was enough for me to revert back to 2.1

Now that you mention it, that makes a lot of sense. I guess I took a pessimistic view on it and just chalked it up to theoretical benchmarks. I still don't always trust benchmarks; When it comes to hard drives, benchmarks typically show RAID0 giving you double the performance of a single drive, but we know this isn't the case. I have found my SSD's scale much better than SATA drives, coming much closer to actually giving me "double" the performance in real world situations, but it's still not perfectly linear like the benchmarks imply.

I think you are correct about the "too fast" part because I have another instance of it that I had forgotten about until just last week when I fired up an old IBM SFF and put Win7 on it. It's so minor I don't even notice it anymore, but basically, MCE "hiccups", or "jitters" during startup. The hiccup is that MCE loads so fast for me, the MCE intro animation is pretty much skipped. During startup; I go from the "Starting Windows" black loading screen, to my desktop for a fraction of a second, then MCE loads with a quick flash of an all black and then all blue screen in maybe half a second, and then I'm in my main menu. The intro "tune" that MCE plays though, does not get skipped. This gives me my goofy hiccup - if you get impatient and start scrolling through the menu before the intro tune is finished, the cursor is reset to the default start tile once the tune finishes. Basically, cursor alignment (Or whatever it's called) is obviously not triggered until after the end of the intro tune. I hope this makes sense - but basically, it feels as if MCE just isn't expecting to load that quick. Some parts of MCE are able to deal with it, while others give just make me say WTF mate? Not a huge deal though, because the solution is to quit acting like an impatient 4 year old and give it literally a half second.

I thought that the hiccup/jitter while scrolling through media browser was a product of the ramdisk software. It felt as if the ramdisk needed to "re-index" or was moving to another "sector" of the ramdisk to read info and it needed a fraction of a second to make the switch. Kind of like a car changing gears. A 2011 Camry (ramdisk) is going to have a much smoother transmission than 1995 Civic (regular SATA). Most people would be more than happy with this, but if you compare the 2011 Camry to a 2011 top of the line Cadillac (SSD's in RAID), the difference is minor, but noticeable because it has one of those CTV transmissions where you don't ever feel it shift. I hope this analogy makes sense - I was happy with the ramdisk, until I discovered that it could be better.

Having said that, I think you made a typo with regards to which RAID version you were using. You state:



I believe you are referring to RAID0, no? I know you know this, but for those of you who don't, RAID1 offers redundancy whilst RAID0 is a spanned, single volume offering a theoretical 2x improvement in read/write performance without any redundancy.

Wow, that's funny that I completely switched them around. Good call sir, you are correct. I mean, my mom always told me I was special. Do I get bonus points for at least being consistent?

Well, if it is as you stated, where the media browser cache "lags" when placed on ramdisk, perhaps it is best to just leave that on the SSD. Additionally, as you mentioned, your ramdisk software would have to load the cache back into your ram partition every time you reboot the system.

Are there any problems associated with putting the live tv stream on ramdisk? Would media center freak out if the partition was empty every time it started up? I suppose that would eliminate all concerns with losing your data on power loss, if it is just the live tv stream.

Yeah, I leave the media browser cache on the OS drive. I built my current HTPC with 8GB of ram because I was planning on using a 4-6GB ramdisk. I don't have anything else that uses DDR3, so I just left it all in there. It's not that I had to do any real "work" to remove the ramdisk, when I concluded it wasn't worth it anymore, I just quit using it. Wouldn't be difficult to go back to it if there was a reason to.

As for using a ramdisk for the live TV stream, I see where I was being a bonehead and not understand you guys. Of course you don't need to mount an image, the live TV stream is empty at startup and cleared during shutdown anyway. When I was testing my live TV stream on my ramdisk, I now see that I was doing it in a roundabout, over complicated way. I believe the way that I did it was with linked folders. My ramdisk image would be mounted at startup with an empty folder that was linked to my live TV stream folder. I feel dumb now because a much easier, and now obvious, solution would be to skip the whole mounting bullshit and just assign the live TV stream to the ramdisk. This would eliminate most of the annoying downsides of the ramdisk.

While I see that I was hating on ramdisks a little too much, I would still make the argument for going with RAID0 - even with the live TV stream. Like I mentioned earlier, I didn't see any improvements with using one for my live TV stream because I don't think I was able to stress the system enough with only 3 extenders. I was planning on using the ramdisk because I was looking to improve the responsiveness of MCE when it came to skip, FF, RW, media loading, etc. I found that the reason I didn't see an improvement was because my bottleneck wasn't actually that hard drive, my bottleneck was my network. Specifically, xboxs are only 100mbps. It doesn't matter how quickly my main HTPC can shove the data down the throat of the xbox's, they were already working as quick as they could. This is why I concluded that the only reason to speed up the live TV stream, would be if you have 4 or more extenders. I'm even kind of guessing at that because I haven't heard of anyone who has done enough "testing" to confidently say X amount of extenders is the limit for a regular SATA drive.

Before I give you my reasoning for preferring RAID0 over a ramdisk for the live TV stream, a little backstory might help so no one else thinks I'm pulling this out of my ass.

In late 2009 I had just moved to Denver for my job. My finance was still in Cincy finishing up her masters degree, so I was by myself in a new city with way too much spare time on my hands. Win7 has recently been released and I thought it showed a lot of promise. Since my old HTPC was starting to show it's age, I set out to build a badass system to be the heart of my whole house media center. Since I could hide the tower behind my entertainment center, size and power consumption took a backseat to performance. My original plan was:

-Quad core Phenom for ripping and encoding
-8GB of DDR3 w/4-6GB for a ramdisk
-SSD for the OS
-RAID0 w/2 1.5TB drives for the live TV recording drive and buffer
-3 2TB drives for storage of TV Series, DVD and BR.
-5670 video card

Like normal, plans change on the fly, especially when you impulsively decide to RAID a pair of SSD's.

I also ended up watercooling the darn thing when my finance (and her cats) moved back in with me. My fans were temp controlled, and with the pet hair clogging everything up, they were constantly kicking into high gear which got annoying very quickly.


Anyway, while I was first assembling the HTPC and tinkering around with it was when I noticed the the SSD's in RAID gave me better performance than the ramdisk (For the media browser cache that is), I simply left the cache on the OS drive like I said. I never got around to firing up the RAID0 array for the recording drive because during my ramdisk testing, I found that it wasn't helping with the live TV stream. I figured that if a ramdisk isn't giving me an improvement, the only thing a RAID array is going to give me is an increased risk of failure . Taking all of this into consideration, is why I say that 2 SSD's in RAID0 for your OS and a good 7200RPM SATA drive for your recorded TV and live TV stream, is all you need for 3 or so extenders. Any other performance improvements, are going to be found in other places vs. the storage system.

Despite all of this, I'm planning on trying the RAID array again for my recording drive with this new HTPC I'm planning. This is also the reason that I am "hating" on ramdisks. What I realize now, that I didn't back in 2009, is that the flaw of the ramdisk is that it is only speeding up ONE part of the system. Generally speaking, if you are looking to increase the performance of your HTPC, it's usually because you have added functionality/reached a limit with something/etc. If you are in this situation, you probably have what would be a more complex system vs. a standalone, basic HTPC. When it comes to complex and integrated systems, fixing one bottleneck typically just gives you another one somewhere else. This is why I think RAID would be better for the recording drive and live TV buffer vs. only putting the live TV buffer on a ramdisk. Speeding up ONLY the live TV buffer doesn't help much because either it works or it doesn't, playback speed is a constant. I didn't realize it at the time, but now that I understand better, the key is speeding up the entire subsystem proportionally. Generally speaking, RAID0's performance gains are the biggest when you are dealing with large, sequential files - which is pretty much the only thing your recorded TV drive is dealing with. I think a RAID0 array for the recorded TV drive is the key to what I was actually looking for - improving the responsiveness of MCE on the extenders - however much, if any, it actually ends up helping is TBD. At the very least, it should let me add another couple of extenders (Bringing me to 4-5 total) without swamping my recorded TV drive and live TV stream.

Ramdisks still have their niche, don't get me wrong, but we have come along way over the past couple of years. Win7, MCE and the MCE community as a whole has dramatically matured and grown over the past couple of years, so I think it's understandable that we have found better ways to do things over time. Overall, I think ramdisks are starting to fall into the same category as SD only tuners do nowadays - It's not that they are a big pile of garbage all of a sudden, but don't forget that it's yesterday's tech and the the flaws are only magnified when added to our more modern systems.

* I wanted to add a little disclaimer: I haven't dealt with media center in a long time, and have never personally used windows 7 media center. I still run windows media center 2005 on my HTPC so some of what I say might not still be relevant (I use MCE 2005 because I'm using firewire to digitally record from my HD STB..which is also why I'm interested in this Ceton card).

Tough to say, I haven't really looked back since I went with Win7 the day after it was released. In general, I can say this - I have found that win7 is much less "bitchy" about intrusive tweaks like ramdisks than Vista was. Don't know about 2005 because I never tried anything like this on it. Back when 2005 was popular, I was a rebel and was using Beyond TV - which I believe is now extinct anyway lol.

 

[markm75]

i just got mine about 2 weeks ago.

the combination of ceton 4 tuner card with all my HD channels and remote potato's ability to stream all the content is Awesome...

now if we could just get the ability to cut commercials out of WTV and output back to WTV we would be living in heaven

Do you have any issues streaming via Remote Potato, the ceton recordings due to DRM issues? In particular, i was thinking of getting the ceton (and getting rid of the haup. hdpvr) and i'm concerned that even local stations and perhaps stations like TBS/TNT/SYFY (via comcast) will have issues due to DRM..

I dont have trouble streaming right now, or even with the regular qam hdhomerun for locals or hdpvr recordings..

 

[nite0]

Do you have any issues streaming via Remote Potato, the ceton recordings due to DRM issues? In particular, i was thinking of getting the ceton (and getting rid of the haup. hdpvr) and i'm concerned that even local stations and perhaps stations like TBS/TNT/SYFY (via comcast) will have issues due to DRM..

I dont have trouble streaming right now, or even with the regular qam hdhomerun for locals or hdpvr recordings..

Depends on the area. TWC in NYC locks down everything with DRM except the locals (CBSHD, ABCHD, etc.), so I can only stream what I record off those channels.

 

[guachi]

Bleh to DRM!!!!!

FiOS has almost nothing with copy protection except for a few random shows on one channel. Might be more channels, but I haven't checked them all. As a result, I'm recording everything in sight before they wise up.

 

[brennok]

What channel and shows? I haven't come across any.

 

[lovemyram4x4]

Bleh to DRM!!!!!

FiOS has almost nothing with copy protection except for a few random shows on one channel. Might be more channels, but I haven't checked them all. As a result, I'm recording everything in sight before they wise up.

FiOS is wised up, ask users in teh Frontier FiOS market and a handful of others. On their new networks(recently setup or upgraded) they're flagging things just as bad as the rest. I believe the only reason they don't start flagging things on the original networks is because there's so many unpaired cablecards out there they get too many complaints(if you're card isn't paired you can't even watch soemthing that's flagged copy once) and are unable to correct the situation, so they wait until the upgrade the network in the area before adding all the copy protections flags. On a plus note the current economy seems to making FiOS much longer to move ahead w/ these upgrades that us people that are now enjoying DRM free TV so we can enjoy it longer and if we're lucky by the time we have to deal w/ it DRM may be implemented in a better way that makes easier for the end user to have fair use of the content will still protecting it from being illegally copied/transferred (example can be shared withing home group but nowhere else).

What channel and shows? I haven't come across any.

Once or twice I saw everything on epix flagged copy once for about a day and when they added that new Disney channel HUB it was copy once for the first couple of days(IIRC this was actually before it was officially supposed to be airing).

 

[Relleum]

My Ceton InfiniTV arrived today. I am wondering if there's any application out there that would allow me to control Windows Media Center from my iPad, rather than using the mouse/keyboard or a WMC remote. I've seen Remote Potato HD, and that would be great if it could actually be used as just a remote for whichever TV is hooked up to the HTPC, but I don't think it has this mode.

How do you all control your htpc?

 

[nite0]

no beers necessary, it took me only about 5 minutes The case is an Antec Fusion Remote. WC might be a pretty tight fit, but heres a slightly wider shot to give you a better feel for the size (taken before the ceton was installed):



Weird, I thought maybe it was just my case. I think the bracket is a little bit too long, so that the tab at the bottom of the bracket hits the case before the connector is fully seated. I'll have to play with it a little more, maybe a little cutting action will be called for.. but then again, its not a huge deal

I have the same HTPC case - is that a Scythe Shurkien or Big Shuriken?

 

[nite0]

My Ceton InfiniTV arrived today. I am wondering if there's any application out there that would allow me to control Windows Media Center from my iPad, rather than using the mouse/keyboard or a WMC remote. I've seen Remote Potato HD, and that would be great if it could actually be used as just a remote for whichever TV is hooked up to the HTPC, but I don't think it has this mode.

How do you all control your htpc?

There are several iPad mouse apps (I believe Logitech has one that's free). Alternatively, if you have the My Movies add-on installed, the My Movies iPad app has a remote too. Remote Potato HD works as well.

 

[Relleum]

There are several iPad mouse apps (I believe Logitech has one that's free). Alternatively, if you have the My Movies add-on installed, the My Movies iPad app has a remote too. Remote Potato HD works as well.

I still don't see anywhere that Remote Potato HD works as a remote control for the main output. Right now I'm using RemoteKitten, but it's not intuitive enough to be a permanent solution. There's an app called Meteor for Windows Phone 7, and that seems like the perfect app to control WMC. I just wish there was something as awesome for the iPhone/iPad.

Does My Movies allow you to control all of WMC, or just the movies portion? Full live tv support is a must.

 

[nite0]

I still don't see anywhere that Remote Potato HD works as a remote control for the main output. Right now I'm using RemoteKitten, but it's not intuitive enough to be a permanent solution. There's an app called Meteor for Windows Phone 7, and that seems like the perfect app to control WMC. I just wish there was something as awesome for the iPhone/iPad.

Does My Movies allow you to control all of WMC, or just the movies portion? Full live tv support is a must.

It can be used just like a WMC remote (it pops up a screen with the same buttons you would find on the remote). Nothing fancy, but it can be a remote replacement. I didn't get Remote Potato HD yet, but I thought the remote feature was included, I could be wrong though.

 

[Vengance_01]

Anyone using this card with Cox in CA? Also does anyone know what kind of DRM they use for the shows?

 

[GuyClinch]

Someone needs to crack the dumb play ready copy protection..its got to be pretty annoying if you have big place with alot of PCs. I'd prefer if Microsoft just made all windows 7 machines extenders. But barring that copy protection breaking would be okay..

 

[Fleat]

Someone needs to crack the dumb play ready copy protection..its got to be pretty annoying if you have big place with alot of PCs. I'd prefer if Microsoft just made all windows 7 machines extenders. But barring that copy protection breaking would be okay..

I really do hope it gets cracked as well. I am considering selling my Ceton and just getting rid of the digital cable. Time Warner in my area has every channel locked down and copy protected including the locals (how is that legal?!). This is by far the largest inconvenience, but not the only one I have been dealing with.

The network tuner sharing for the Ceton is extremely inconsistent and seems to just create headaches for the networked PC. It will stop serving the tuners up to the network PC, and the WDRM status for those tuners will change to red. While I do know how to fix it now, this occurs without fail every 3-4 days. The only fix I have found is to run through the Ceton Network Tuning Wizard AND the digital TV setup again on both PCs. If this doesn't work, sometimes it also requires clearing the Ceton tuner configuration in the diagnostics panel. I am also having the SDV tuning error every three to four days. Nothing appears to fix this except for a complete restart of the computer. Unfortunately, if you happen to experience these issues while you are gone and recording something, that scheduled recording will not occur. Luckily, I have an extremely understanding fiancé....

 

[Schro]

I really do hope it gets cracked as well. I am considering selling my Ceton and just getting rid of the digital cable. Time Warner in my area has every channel locked down and copy protected including the locals (how is that legal?!). This is by far the largest inconvenience, but not the only one I have been dealing with.

The network tuner sharing for the Ceton is extremely inconsistent and seems to just create headaches for the networked PC. It will stop serving the tuners up to the network PC, and the WDRM status for those tuners will change to red. While I do know how to fix it now, this occurs without fail every 3-4 days. The only fix I have found is to run through the Ceton Network Tuning Wizard AND the digital TV setup again on both PCs. If this doesn't work, sometimes it also requires clearing the Ceton tuner configuration in the diagnostics panel. I am also having the SDV tuning error every three to four days. Nothing appears to fix this except for a complete restart of the computer. Unfortunately, if you happen to experience these issues while you are gone and recording something, that scheduled recording will not occur. Luckily, I have an extremely understanding fiancé....

Have you contacted Ceton about this issue? From what I've observed since the product's release, they have been very proactive in addressing issues like this.

 

[Vengance_01]

Guys I am looking for a basic Universal remote that will work with my TV, A/V receiver, and WMC7 HTPC. I was looking at this remote Logitech Harmony 300i (915-000143) Universal Infrared Remote. Will need a USB IR receiver? If so will something like this work?

http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-HP-5188-166...267?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item56453e7bbb

 

[Schro]

Guys I am looking for a basic Universal remote that will work with my TV, A/V receiver, and WMC7 HTPC. I was looking at this remote Logitech Harmony 300i (915-000143) Universal Infrared Remote. Will need a USB IR receiver? If so will something like this work?

http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-HP-5188-166...267?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item56453e7bbb

Something like that should work fine. I bought the Microsoft branded MCE remote/IR receiver, tossed the remote, and use my Harmony 880 to control the HTPC, TV, Receiver and PS3 (IR to BT adapter needed).

I swear I saw the Microsoft branded ones for $15 on amazon recently (remote + IR), but I can't seem to find them now...

 

[Vengance_01]

Thanks. I will keep my eye out on Amazon. I have about 2 weeks before I move into my place and setup Cox cable.

 

[Fleat]

Yea, I have two tickets in with Ceton. The support is decent (quick response), but the SDV tuning error is something that was supposedly fixed in a previous firmware version. I have also tried fresh rebuilds of both PCs. When it works, it does function exceptionally well...

 

[LstBrunnenG]

This looks really, really nice, but I'm not sure I want to give up the On Demand content Comcast offers.

 

[Schro]

Yea, I have two tickets in with Ceton. The support is decent (quick response), but the SDV tuning error is something that was supposedly fixed in a previous firmware version. I have also tried fresh rebuilds of both PCs. When it works, it does function exceptionally well...

So I've had mine a week and I'm getting what appears to be SDV tuning issues now... the troubleshooting begins. I've got the Cisco TA with the 4 tuner firmware onboard...

 

[Harry1969]

Wow these things sounds like a pia. I was thinking about picking up one of these cards but now I think I'll stick with the HD PVR a little longer.