On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 1:04 PM, Udo Richter udo_richter@gmx.de wrote:
On 08.05.2009 01:17, Andrew Herron wrote:
I agree it must put extra wear & stress on the hard drive and yes the energy usage must be higher.
I don't think so. Disks don't wear that much by reading and writing. Spinning up and down, heating up and cooling down, shaking them, do lots of seek operations, thats wearing a hard disk much more. (Flash disks are different.)
Heat (ironically in some cases helps performance) especially wears parts faster. Putting a fan on a harddrive only keeps the housing cool, which is a good thing, but it doesn't do anything for where the heat is actually being generated. You can run a harddrive 24/7/365 but when you do that there's a higher risk the next time you spin it up you'll hear clicking.
OTOH, 4GB of RAM isn't very expensive any more, and should be enough for roughly 1h of HDTV with good quality (~9mbit), or?
If there's any intention to add live tv caching then ram should definitely be available to the user as a storage option. Although I don't really care about the feature, I don't mind if my ram is being used whereas I absolutely don't want a harddrive constantly running for it. Btw, I haven't paid more then $20 for 2x2GB sticks of ram in ages, though I always take advantage of MIR's on them. I actually have 8GB sitting new in the packaging but didn't want to pass up some great deals. :)
Regards, Derek