Using an SSD as an unrar/download drive

[Effortless88]

As all my PC upgrades are done for this year (except for this one), I'm considering getting an SSD just for Sabnzb as a download + extraction drive. That is, download and extract to the SSD only. Would that seriously speed up extraction speeds? Right now, a 15GB linux .iso takes 2min 20sec to unrar roughly. Would an SSD slash that heavily? I don't care about longevity (if it dies I'll chuck it and get another), just speed - would a fresh new SSD help? I have an i3 3220, so not worried about lack of CPU grunt.

[shypike]

I haven't done benchmarking, but I doubt whether that's good investment.
Giving SABnzbd a sufficient article cache will already reduce disk access.
Unrar is a bit slow when unpacking but AFAIK the disk
is not the bottleneck.

[war59312]

Is the unrar version being used muil-threaded?

If not, that of course would speed things up.

[shypike]

Unrar is mostly disk bound, especially since most
posts aren't even compressed; they just use the unrar format as a container.
Having seperate disks for "incomplete" and "complete" is the best way to speed things up.

[Effortless88]

I'll be getting a 128GB SSD just for this purpose. I'm fairly certain the difference is worth the $100 for the SSD. unraring and repairing is disk heavy, so a SSD should help. Anyway, will buy, test and report back.

[tymanthius]

I'm just curious - apparently the way I do things is little different. I'm never waiting on something to download, check, repair, unrar. But I don't expect to watch stuff THIS INSTANT. Is it really that needful to get a few extra seconds by getting an SSD?

Don't get me wrong, I want to get an SSD for my OS drive on my server, but that's to reduce boot times, and get system performance increases across the board. And it's a low priority.

[batt01]

As all my PC upgrades are done for this year (except for this one), I'm considering getting an SSD just for Sabnzb as a download + extraction drive. That is, download and extract to the SSD only. Would that seriously speed up extraction speeds? Right now, a 15GB linux .iso takes 2min 20sec to unrar roughly. Would an SSD slash that heavily? I don't care about longevity (if it dies I'll chuck it and get another), just speed - would a fresh new SSD help? I have an i3 3220, so not worried about lack of CPU grunt.

Add the time it takes to transfer the completed file to its final destination and you might find you dont gain that much real world performance. I love SSD for boot/OS drive. But just for unrar, I am not sure its worth it. If 2min to unrar a 15gig is problem, burning or making a bootable usb must make you apaplectic.