Comments on: Speeding up Media Browser using a Flash Drive

By: Stephen Fisher

Stephen Fisher — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 12:21:23 +0000

I use the RamDisk software from Qsoft and just have the imagecache folder on the ramdrive and the images load in less than a second, I’m going to transfer the playstate files to the ramdrive too as loading them is what is slowing mediabrowser down now *tut*

Brilliant tip though, saved my media browser a few minutes of loading time

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 13:40:33 +0000

tried this with the drive you listed. Made mine work much slower

By: Michael Healy

Michael Healy — Mon, 10 May 2010 18:18:43 +0000

I don’t think the Xbox Creates it’s own cache but I’m not sure how much this will speed it up either considering it’s got the network to traverse as well.

By: SBM

SBM — Mon, 10 May 2010 14:02:14 +0000

Does this also work using Media Browser on a Xbox 360? Or does the Xbox create its own cache?

By: Amish

Amish — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 05:39:20 +0000

I found it to be much faster as long as you dont use back drops. when u turn on backdrops it slowed down.

By: Attiska

Attiska — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 21:20:13 +0000

What do you think about to use a small (like 160GB) notebook sata drive-as cheap as an 8gb pendrive…

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 16:22:53 +0000

I just posted this on the Live TV Buffer tip but I’d also like to try this out. Can this be done with a SD CARD instead of a USB thumb drive? I have a reader built in on my computer that doesn’t get used. It would be nice to stick a card in and forget about it.

By: Brian Barry

Brian Barry — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 19:19:37 +0000

I tried this and it actually made the program much slower… I’ve no idea why, on a 2GB flash drive Media Browser was using around 835MB of data, so it wasn’t a case of it being filled and choking because of it. So, I have no idea why.

It’s a shame because it’s quite slow enough as it is.

By: Calan

Calan — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:25:49 +0000

I didn’t like the idea of having my cache “vulnerable” if my USB stick got pulled out. Also, my USB stick has an orange activity light that would probably get annoying when watching things in the dark.

I instead opted to move my cache from my OS/pagefile drive to my RAID5 array. I know that many users will not have a HTPC with a RAID array in it. I am actually planning to make this computer (or its RAID at least) into a server and build a HTPC with an SSD, so I’m largely testing Win7 MC to see if it will do everything I want it to do (in previous experience, things won’t be a complete solution – right now my only problem is subtitles though). For now, though, the I’m noticing the slowdowns with only a couple hundred movies (a 600mb MediaBrowser folder).

So I copied the cache to my RAID5 and defragmented. I just opened up media center now, and library validation took 18 seconds – usually takes about 5. I guess that makes sense because of the nature of RAID5.

Anyway, for anyone wanting to go down that road, I’d say don’t. Flash drive is probably a better way to go, or frequently-defragmented partition on your harddrive.

By: Michael Healy

Michael Healy — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 03:12:28 +0000

Delete the folder shortcut created by the mklink program then copy the original data back to the original location.