[Milhouse]

Not everything is loaded into memory, right? The thumbnail cache can grow to several gigabytes, so I take it the media artwork speed is unchanged?

Does the ramdisk allow the Pi to be safely hard shutoff? That would be a benefit when taking power off the TV's USB port.

Its just SYSTEM that is being loaded into RAM - the XBMC Storage area is not being loaded into RAM, so media artwork speed will remain unchanged.

You should never "hard shutoff" the Pi or you will risk trashing the XBMC Storage partition (and if you don't trash it completely, you'll most likely lose the most recent file updates that have yet to be flushed from file buffer memory).

It's actually quite easy to "lose" an update such as a thumbnail that has been recently cached (ie. entry written to the texture db, but the converted image not yet flushed to SD card) if you power cycle the Pi (or it locks up) - when you try to view that same thumbnail after restarting the system, XBMC complains that it can't find the image in the texture cache (and will never find it no matter what you do - it would be nice if XBMC automatically re-cached the image to resolve this cache discrepancy).

If the Storage partition were mounted with the sync option then it might reduce the chance of data loss, though not sure what effect this would have on write performance - if the number of disk writes are low then maybe it's worth a try? Could it be added as an option to cmdline.txt eg. "sync|nosync[defaullt]"? If users are using MySQL then the number of disk writes to SD card will be relatively low (mostly log writes, plugin updates and newly cached images). I'd rather have the safety of sync than run the risk of a crash or reboot losing data that then remains forever "not found".

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are your newer files accessible to the user that xbmc runs as

Yes, I can easily access and play these files if I manually go to the source. What I can't seem to be able to do is to make XBMC add these new files to the library when I request it to search for new content or update the library.

Any ideas?

Are you adding new content to a directory that is already defined as a media source, or are you adding these files in a new directory? In XBMC 11 I have a situation where I added a top level folder as a video source, and specified it recursively, and scraped it without a problem, but a while later I discovered that any new folders I create within that top level folder are not scraped automatically, I first need to manually specify their content (as Movies etc.). Unless and until I specify their content, these new sub-directories/folders will be ignored whenever I "Update Library" - maybe it's the same for you?