[awp0]

Hi all,

Quick question for the experts:
I have XBMC configured just the way I like it in Windows. However, sometimes I encounter some performance issues that I believe to be the result of an old WD Green Power drive that's unfortunately installed as my system drive. I've run performance monitor and observed that the performance issues seem to occur during times of high disk utilization, so I think it's the drive. One use case that seems to do this fairly reliably is to bring up the PVR guide while watching live TV. XBMC will stall for a moment and I can see that disk activity spikes. This is a i3-3225 based system with 8 gigs of RAM, so I don't think it's otherwise under-powered.

Anyway, I have this small 32-gig SSD drive (SATA 3) and it occurred to me that maybe I could move the XBMC directory (and Roaming/XBMC directory) to the drive and then just use a symlink to point Windows to it? I'm also managing my library in MySQL, so maybe I could do the same for MySQL? Would this work, or is it a dumb idea?

I suppose I could reinstall XBMC into that drive, but I have all these damn scripts and dependencies and I'm worried that it'll get pretty confusing.

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

[jhhoffma]

I don't see why that wouldn't work. Thought you can easily copy the entire XBMC user directory to a new install to keep everything the same.

Though I don't know if it will help with your situation.

Might be better off installing windows and XBMC to the SSD and everything else on the HDD.

I'd probably get something better than a cheap 32GB SSD for that though.

[awp0]

Thanks for the advice!

Being the cheap guy that I am, I'm going to give this a try with my 32GB SSD and see how it does. In the meantime I'll keep my eye out for a cheap 120GB SSD that I can properly image my whole system partition onto.

Update: Over the last 20 minutes or so I used a freeware app called Junction Link Magic to create junction targets on the SSD for the XBMC and MySQL directories. I did this remotely from work and everything seemed to work fine, but I'm not currently able to test this out. MySQL started back up fine, so that's good. This is a 24/7 machine, so I'm not as concerned about start-up performance. I really just want the XBMC UI to perform better.

I'll post back when I have more results. Who knows, if it works then maybe it'll be a reasonable $40 performance upgrade for other Windows XBMC users.

[awp0]

Updated the title to reflect that I used junctions, not symbolic links. They're similar, but different.

Anyway, I moved XBMC, MySQL and ArgusTV over to the SSD (using junctions) and everything is working great. Performance of the XBMC UI (with Aeon Nox) appears noticeably faster. Channel changing seems a little quicker too. I may move some other items over.

This is actually a ReadyCache SSD disk that I reformatted to a normal NTFS disk. I don't think ReadyCache worked great in XBMC because (I believe) the media files would fill up the revolving cache too quickly, thereby eliminating most of the performance improvement. However, as a small fast SSD that holds some key apps it seems to work pretty well.

[navigates]

Yes you can. This is the syntax and I've done something similar on my laptop though,

C:\Users\Frost\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync>MkLink /J "C:\Users\Fro
st\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup" "D:\iTunesBackup"

Hope this helps.

Note: First step is to physically move the xbmc folder to your SSD
then create the mklink and it will work seemingly.

Question. If you have an SSD why not boot off of that as well?
BTW: Frosty is my sweet little mini poodle boy. Everything in my home is named Frost.

[awp0]

Thanks Navigates. Yeah, I'd like to boot off of the SSD, but it's only 32GB and my boot drive is almost 100GB. So I would need to spend a lot of time trimming it down and moving stuff to different drives. I wanted something a little easier. So far it's working great. But if I find a good deal on a larger SSD then I'll definitely switch the whole OS over.

[navigates]

I have a 64 gb ssd. if you have win7, you could possibly get by by windows 7 bootup, and xbmc. The rest of the programs can be on your non ssd drive.
On my laptop i have a ssd with all softwares installed (Microsoft Office, Virus Scanner, XBMC, NERO and a few more and I have about 30 gb remaining).

Once done, I used knoppix cd to delete the undeletable folders from the 750 gb hdd. Think about it, you will have a clean and fresh fast install.

[awp0]

I don't want to install the OS from scratch. Too much crap to re-do (MySQL, ArgusTV, MSSQL, Media Center Master, EventGhost, uTorrent, etc etc). Can you recommend a good imaging application? That's really the only way I would want to do it. Thanks.