[popcornmix]

I'm not sure if this is a fair or even useful comparison and I will probably get shot down by some of the more knowledgeable people on this forum but I tried copying my thumbnails folder to another location on the storage usb using:
"time cp -r /storage/.xbmc/userdata/Thumbnails/* /storage/downloads/Thumbnails"

Seems a valid test to me. I'm surprised the difference was so great, but this is certainly interesting information. Thanks.

What might be interesting is installing a new add-on or skin. I think the write speed would be significant in that.
I seem to remember Aeon Nox took a couple of minutes to install. Installing from a zip file would avoid internet download speed being the bottleneck.

Another test would be something like:

Code:

./texturecache.py C movies

Again that might be dominated by internet download speed or jpeg decode/encode, but it might show a difference.