1 drive or 4?

paradisiac · 28 Feb 2012 at 09:42

ok, so my htpc is reall quick at booting to windows with the SSD, launch XBMC or WMC and it takes an age due to nearly 2TB of music/films/tv show. so my question is, is it slow because its all on 1 hard drive so 4 500GB drives would improve it, or is it just i have too much stuff for my pc to coupe with?

feck199 · 28 Feb 2012 at 13:55

I don't think splitting them across hard drives would make that much difference in theory if either program was trying to read all four drives at once loading different folders. It would be better.

But I don't see there been any point. They are likely reading filenames/id tags one by one until everything is loaded. It's been a while since i've used any with a large media folder.

If once it finally loads it runs fast then this wont really help, but if switching/brosweing folders still lags. Just make more folders

, accessing one large folder with lots of files in will make plenty of things slow down!

Banzai_Joe · 28 Feb 2012 at 14:06

If you raided them they'd surely read quicker, but just splitting data across 4 drives manually is not likely to yield better speeds.
Raid would give either speed, security or both, but may cost you a drive.

paradisiac · 28 Feb 2012 at 15:14

****199 said:
I don't think splitting them across hard drives would make that much difference in theory if either program was trying to read all four drives at once loading different folders. It would be better.

But I don't see there been any point. They are likely reading filenames/id tags one by one until everything is loaded. It's been a while since i've used any with a large media folder.

If once it finally loads it runs fast then this wont really help, but if switching/brosweing folders still lags. Just make more folders , accessing one large folder with lots of files in will make plenty of things slow down!

so rather than for media sources selecting 'films' 'music' 'tv' folders, i would be better selecting them but the internal folder seperatly :
Films - Action
Fimls - Animated
........

or am i not understanding right (which is normally the case

)