Buffering to memory vs. buffering to hard drive

Since Channels buffers to memory vs buffering to the DVR storage hard drive, I'm a bit worried that it's going to significantly decrease the lifespan of my Nvidia Shield.

Flash memory has a finite lifespan, and constantly reading/writing to the Shield memory seems like it's a lot of wear on the device.

Also, I've noticed that the actual buffer space is significantly decreased when hitting pause on Channels as it is compared to the HDHomerun Software where it buffers to the hard drive DVR. So that would be another negative, although not as significant.

Thoughts?

Modern flash storage uses wear-leveling and can last for decades even when writing constantly.

If you really want to use the DVR for buffering, the easiest way is probably to switch Home Streaming Quality from Original to 1080p 8mbps. That will keep the 1hr buffer on the DVR server. However if your recordings are mpeg2 then it will also transcode, which you may or may not want.

Of course you can also hit record on any program and watch the recording instead of buffering live data on the player device.

Thanks for the info. :+1: