[cascius]

Hi guys, I love my XBMC HTPC right now and need to do a final tweak: speed up the library view, especially with things like wall view in AEON.

For that I was thinking of two options:
- 1 SSD drive
- 2 or 4 flash drives in raid...

I don't really care about having windows run out of either ones. I would mainly have my userdata folder on those. So for all I care it could be 4x 1GB super fast flash drives.

What do you guys think? Do you have any recommendations? I'd like to avoid spending $150 for an SSD if at all possible...

Thanks in advance,

- Cas

[boyofford]

gona watch this thread!

i have run a full ubuntu installation installed on a usb stick with XBMC installed and had no problems on a old dell dimension and ran much faster than install on hard disk, espesially on boot.

Though i did the install on the usb just to check things would work so didn't have a large amount of files due to space.

I'd imagine it would work well tho.
And i'm setting up a new install this week and may try this again!

[Weavus]

You can gain an increase in borwsing speed by making sure all tbn files in the userdata thumbnail cache are BMP format. See this http://www.xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=56528. Try that before spending any money.

[cascius]

That sounds like a good idea. The other thing I'm considering is using SuperSpeed RamDisk Plus. It's a software that let's you create a ram drive, which obviously would be way faster than reading from the disk. The nice thing about this ramdrive is that it actually saves an image of the ramdisk to the hardrive before shutting down the computer and reloads it after boot.

I'm not sure how large my library is but I think it's around 100Megs. That should be very fast to load/save.

So my first test will be to convert my thumbnails to BMPs, then test with that ramdisk.

I'll post my findings when i get to it.

Any suggestions, as always, are welcomed.

- Cas

PS: also just got 6 usb flash drives from work, I might also test that raid idea.

[topfs2]

Also in babylon+1
http://xbmc.org/jmarshall/2009/05/12/som...d-loading/

Scrolling in MediaStream Redux is silky smooth (think Aeon ariga has background loading but someone have to confirm that)

[cascius]

Alright, so I tested the Ram Disk idea and the results are fantastic.

When using Aeon wall view with the maximum number of tiles, it takes less than a second to load a full screen of thumbnails. Also, XBMC itself starts instantly and the overall responsiveness is lightning fast.

What I did:
- Installed SuperSpeed RamDisk Plus 10
- Create a Ram Disk Z: of 1Gig, and checked the option to save the content of the Ram Drive to Disk whenever you shut down the computer.
- Install a portable version of XBMC + Aeon to Z:\Programs Files\XBMC
- Import all the movie folders.

It does add a few seconds to both booting up and shutting down, but if you're like me and always have your computer on or on standby, it doesn't matter at all.

Anyway, I hope this is useful for some of you.

- Cas