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Should I use a SSD or HD to hold the transcode buffer? A SSD is faster but I don't know how much of a difference it will make. And a SSD has a much more limited number of writes before it wears out compared to a hard disk. Finally a SSD have lower capacity compared to hard disks for a given price. I could use either a 60 GB SSD or a 250 GB hard disk for a transcoding cache. Which would be better?
I would suggest using an SSD as your primary C drive and/or for Windows paging files since this is where you will see benefits of the high read/write speeds that can be obtained from SSDs.
Once your transcoded files have been created, they just sit on disk like any other media file and Mezzmo streams them just like any other media file to your devices so there's little benefit of using SSD over HDD. Also, depending on your collection of files, you may need quite a large size for your transcoded files. By default, Mezzmo allows up to 120GB before it starts to 'garbage collect' (remove older transcoded files). You may reach this maximum quite easily if you have a lot of full-length movies or TV shows. You can increase/decrease the transcoded folder size in the Transcoding Settings dialog.
Perhaps other users can share their experiences on using SSDs on their Windows computer.
Thanks Paul for the advice. I'll use the 250 GB hard drive. Is a large buffer needed for on-the-fly transcoding as well?
In general, the more memory and CPU cores available for transcoding the faster your transcoding will be.