Hi,

I've scoured all over these forums, but was surprised this hasn't been raised.

I will shortly be installing an Win7 on an SSD and would like to store specific files and directories away from this disk, to minimise the writes. I plan to use a regular HDD for more dynamic data.

There's a wealth of detail on the web about moving the IE cache, prefetch etc... and even on here about moving the Live TV buffer but I could not find anything about Guide Data.

 I expect most people would say that Guide Data would not thrash at the disk heavily, but it's something I'd like to try.

 Could anyone tell me the exact location of Guide Data in 7MC ?

Any advice or pointers would be appreciated.

 

Thanks

c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\EPG

One of the nice things about having a SSD is that data like the EPG will load faster. You really shouldn't be too concerned about the writes

Speaking of the EPG data - is there a way to cache it in memory - my HD bangs for 5-10 secs. when I pull up the guide!!

If you don't mind tweaking (symlink + sync'g) and have free RAM you can point the ehome folder to a RAM drive

Edit: I should mention that I do this all 2 of my systems, those w/o SSD

You could try using this technique for the epg folder instead of the temprec folder

http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/07/using-a-usb-drive-as-live-tv-buffer.html

 You do know that many SSD have a mean time between failures of 1,500,000 hours? And that is with constant writes.  That's about 171 years.  I've used them for years and never have seen a failure.  A normal drive in 24/7 operation lasts about 2 to 3 years.

Thanks for the responses. It sounds like most of you are encouraging the use of Guide data storage on SSD's. Yes, perhaps I'm being abit paranoid about storing guide data on an SSD, but it would be worthwhile hearing how data is written. I've read the MS article here on Win 7 with SSDs (see here : http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx) as well as this excellent set up guide here (http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=63273) but there seems to be no mentioning of 7MC optimisation. From what I can tell in the Microsoft article, if data that is written to in large sequential writes then this is a good thing. I just wonder if this would apply to guide data.

Read this:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

 

It has everything you need to know about SSDs and more.

Thank you for the link.  Extremely interesting reading.

I'm stilling running an XP(MCE2005) machine, and plan on building a Win7 system next year.

Please forgive my ignorance.  Does Win7 support TRIM?

Seems like the 80gb Intel M would make a fine boot/app drive.

Skid 

It does support TRIM but not all drives support it.

I just finished installing an 80gig Intel SSD and the guide pulls up in a flash, there is no waiting at all.  I was considering moving the guide data to my Ramdrive but there is simply no need, the SSD is as fast as it gets.  I have however moved my Live TV buffer to a 32gig internal flash drive and increased the buffer to 2 hours which is cool.  I then installed MediaBrowser directly to my 4gig ram drive and linked the cache files to my ramdrive as well.  With these improvements my Windows 7 Media Center is lightning quick.

mikinho

If you don't mind tweaking (symlink + sync'g) and have free RAM you can point the ehome folder to a RAM drive

Edit: I should mention that I do this all 2 of my systems, those w/o SSD

 

I'd like to try this idea as a fix until I upgrade to an ssd next year, as after using guide tool, I have ended up with a huge epg file!

Is there a good place (not too technical ) you could recommend for learning more about setting up symlinks and syncing in windows?

thanks.

@holidayboy This link tells you how to move your Live TV buffer, but the principle should still apply to the EPG. http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/07/using-a-usb-drive-as-live-tv-buffer.html Out of interest.. Just how big is your EPG ? Are you using Freeview, Freesat, Sky or a combination ?

Thanks for the link - I'm going to have a go later tonight hopefully.

I've never used symlinks before, so I haven't got my head around how the ramdrive is poulated after reboots etc......

These days I have to throw one piece of information out of my brain before I can any absorb any new stuff

I'm not sure how large the epg file is now, but it takes over 8 secs for the guide to show up (purely FTA channels)!

As a quick fix I may just have media center default to the guide page on startup.

I'm now using multiple lineups after using guidetool to get missing data to show for some sat channels (not a complete sucess, but it is better now) - I now use freeview, astra 28.2 and sky lineups.