Is it ok to run TVHeadend from SD Card?

Whiffle · 15 Jan 2019 at 13:08

I have just been looking at the growing number of people that have been using SBC's (RPis, Odroid, Pine64) for all their recordings via TVHeadend.

It seems that they have been installing TVHeadend (and an underlying OS) on the SD Card and then recording to an external Hard Drive.

Does anyone know whether TVHeadend makes constant writes to the installation media or whether things such as EPG updates and scheduling is held in RAM?

Buffalo2102 · 15 Jan 2019 at 14:49

TV Headend EPG data is typically held in memory but there are options to write to disk periodically, if required. You don't have to enable that though.

I wouldn't really worry about it anyway - EPG data is not huge and doesn't change a great deal once it's grabbed so shouldn't really cause an issue.

Whiffle · 15 Jan 2019 at 15:19

Thank you - that is really assuring to know.

The only other thing that I would need to stick on the SD card is a MYSQL Datatbase that would sync the watched status between all my Kodi client's. I assume that that would also be no particular problem for the card?

Buffalo2102 · 15 Jan 2019 at 15:30

I doubt it would have a big impact. As with all these things, it really depends on the amount and frequency of writes, the quality of the SD card, etc.. Worst case is that the lifespan of the SD card will be reduced slightly but they aren't expensive these days.

In any event, just don't entrust it to store essential data without having a proper backup. But that's true for any type of media.