Question: Performance difference HDD vs. SSD?

[Andre_H]

Hi Folks,

for the question below, I would be interested in a statement from the developers as well as user reports: How important is hard drive speed for Mediamonkey?

Background: My MediaMonkey Installation (Server and Main "client") runs as a VM in a HyperV, on physical disks at 5400 RPM. With increasing tracks (approx. 32,000) and (often multi-level and heavily nested) playlists (approx. 700), I have the feeling that MediaMonkey is becoming noticeably slower, especially when building/requerying playlists, and even more so when syncing the devices (duration full sync: about 45 minutes now), but also when saving after changing tags etc.

I start considering moving the whole HyperV-platform to SSD, costs would be around €500. NVME won't be possible, I can only install SATA SSD, like those 550 MB/sec-models.

Question: Can I expect noticeable acceleration here, or do I have to look elsewhere first, database optimizations, etc.
Has anyone already done such a system change and can report back? What do the devs say? Will it be worth the money?

[Lowlander]

Playlists or AutoPlaylists? AutoPlaylists can be slow when you have slower database access (like a slow spinning drive) and when you start gathering more files. An AutoPlaylist is calculated from database when you use it.

They say the biggest performance jump is from hdd to sdd. As far as cost, you could consider a solution where the database file is on the SSD, not your media files.

[Andre_H]

Sorry for the late reply, I've had a hectic few days:

I'm going to copy my installation to an SSD computer as a test and see the difference in performance.

[Rob_S]

I can tell you this much, once you have an SSD system drive, you will never go back

My SSD laptop reboots in 30 seconds compared to minutes for my old HDD. I achieved the same results by implanting an SSD into an older slow laptop, which was connected to the original HDD cable, so it is indeed the drive and not the processor.

Windows updates install in seconds as well.

I did NOT notice much change in performance of my applications including mediamonkey, but then I have only about 15k files

[Andre_H]

I can tell you this much, once you have an SSD system drive, you will never go back

Hi Rob,

I am aware of the fundamental performance gain of SSDs; all my computers have SSD drives. Except my physical server (a total of 16TB in SSD was outside the budget at the time, although I now regret at least the 5400 RPM disks), and therefore not the virtual server on which my MediaMonkey runs.

The explicit reason for my question: My MediaMonkey database has almost 150MB, that could run entirely in RAM and then an SSD should bring less performance gains ... but I'm not familiar enough with how the MediaMonkey DB works.

I'll be "offline" for 3 weeks now, then I'll test my MediaMonkey installation on a laptop with an SSD and check the difference.

Andre.