[bertybassett]

Do you think they will be noticebaled speed improvements using a USB 3.0

I get these speeds with my USB 3.0 on a USB 2 port.

http://imgur.com/ickBQZh

VS

class 6 samsung SD card.

http://imgur.com/s6wfCXw

out of intrest I ahve ordered a class 10 samsung card too for testing.


For the small gain in 4k write speed I am not sure its worth the hassle. What do you guys think?

[wrxtasy]

A lot of those USB guides you see written were in the early days of the RPi when there were SD card corruption issues.
These have now been sorted out in Firmware quite a while ago.

Plus there are now proper 5V/2.0Amp reliable power supplies around, so that fixes power interrupt and SD card corruption issues as well.

As your testing has shown, there is very little gain unless you need more storage space.
Better gains are made if you store and manage a large library Metadata properly as I have written about here...

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid1910911

This Metadata storage structure applies equally to all networked low powered Kodi devices as well that have a large media library

[trogggy]

Better gains are made if you store and manage a large library Metadata properly as I have written about here...

Curious as to the reasons behind this:

- don't use a local library, thats what cheap NAS storage is for.

Pi + openelec + media = media player + network server.
I don't recall any particular issues doing that... ?

[bertybassett]

A lot of those USB guides you see written were in the early days of the RPi when there were SD card corruption issues.
These have now been sorted out in Firmware quite a while ago.

Plus there are now proper 5V/2.0Amp reliable power supplies around, so that fixes power interrupt and SD card corruption issues as well.

As your testing has shown, there is very little gain unless you need more storage space.
Better gains are made if you store and manage a large library Metadata properly as I have written about here...

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid1910911

This Metadata storage structure applies equally to all networked low powered Kodi devices as well that have a large media library

was manily think about speed but thanks for the usefuly words, I still might give it a try at the weekend just fo kicks.

[joelbaby]

I am suprised at how slowly the RPi2 is writing to the Micro SD card.
Below are the results on a 90MB/s Sandisk Extreme, and it writes at 12MB/s. Cubox-i gets 20MB/s (which is also too low).
OpenElec is definitely faster with a Class 10 UHS card than with a cheap Class 4.

Code:

OpenELEC-RPi:~/test # dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1K count=1M
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.0GB) copied, 84.702805 seconds, 12.1MB/s
OpenELEC-RPi:~/test # dd if=test of=/dev/null bs=1K count=1M
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.0GB) copied, 42.964840 seconds, 23.8MB/s

Here is the output from using a fast USB3.0 stick

Code:

OpenELEC-RPi:/var/media/test # dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1K count=1M
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.0GB) copied, 40.694628 seconds, 25.2MB/s
OpenELEC-RPi:/var/media/test # dd if=test of=/dev/null bs=1K count=1M
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.0GB) copied, 26.047084 seconds, 39.3MB/s

Do you think they will be noticebaled speed improvements using a USB 3.0

Although the USB stick speeds are double what can be achieved using Micro SD, I think that OpenElec is responsive enough using a Class 10 card (for example a Sandisk Ultra). Using a Micro SD looks neater too.

[bertybassett]

The samung Class 6 drive listed above was £5 and the speed of the OPENelec in every days use was fine. I upgraded to a Samsung class 10 UI £6.70 from that famous jungle site with double the Crystal Mark speed and guess what I could tell no difference in the everyday speed of OPENelec.

I guess joelbaby is correct the Pi is limiting the SD card no matter what SD card we use.

Still going to try the USB to see if it squesh any more speed out of it. You might ask why if it already runs fine, well the answer is becuase I know it can go faster.

[bertybassett]

BTW the samsung cards have a much better 4k write than all the other cards I tested. The class 6 samsung was much better at writing that a sandisk extreme class 10 UI

[wrxtasy]

Better gains are made if you store and manage a large library Metadata properly as I have written about here...

Curious as to the reasons behind this:

Scraping a large Media library externally to the RPi using a powerful PC is far far quicker than letting the RPi do it, especially when using slick software like MediaElch. RPi SD write speeds are slow. This is the only way to manage it with a large library media library especially on a RPi B/B+

- don't use a local library, thats what cheap NAS storage is for.

Pi + openelec + media = media player + network server.
I don't recall any particular issues doing that... ?

Wait till you end up with a large media library that needs lots and lots of Metadata and then try and scan this library back into a RPi. Do you want the RPi to rescrape it all again or would you rather Metadata stored externally and import it very quickly.

[trogggy]

Sorry, this doesn't compute at all.
This is what I questioned...

- don't use a local library, thats what cheap NAS storage is for.

This was the answer...

Scraping a large Media library externally to the RPi using a powerful PC is far far quicker than letting the RPi do it, especially when using slick software like MediaElch. RPi SD write speeds are slow. This is the only way to manage it with a large library media library especially on a RPi B/B+

Wait till you end up with a large media library that needs lots and lots of Metadata and then try and scan this library back into a RPi. Do you want the RPi to rescrape it all again or would you rather Metadata stored externally and import it very quickly.

You're confusing ease of scraping with site of library*, neither of which is even slightly relevant to location of media.

1. If you scrape on a pc and then transfer the library to the pi you have a local library on the pi. Other than mysql or upnp - both of which need another machine running - that's the only option there is. You're surely not saying only use mysql / upnp on the pi?
2. You can scrape a large media library on the pi - it's slower but it works. If you're desperate to look at your library on the pi it's not a good option. Scraping a library (from scratch) is not something I'd guess most people do very often, though. Why would you?
3. Neither of the above, or anything you wrote for that matter, have anything to do with media location - which was what I questioned. If your files are on a drive attached to the pi you can still scrape on a pc - it's literally irrelevant.
4. Gosh, I guess when I end up with a large Media library I should put some effort into organising it - maybe think about folder structure, keep artwork and .nfo's in individual folders to aid scraping, maybe use some sort of media manager to get things just how I like. Put together some sets, tags, playlists, that sort of thing?


If what you actually meant was 'If you want to scrape a library quickly don't do it on the pi' then I can agree.

*Edit: On a second read, maybe you're confusing artwork, .nfo's etc with 'the library'? But there's still nothing you've written that suggests it's a bad thing to store them on the pi, even if they're not scraped by the pi.

[wrxtasy]

It helps if you stop cherrypicking parts of the originally referred article... but point taken and I've taken the confusion out and amended it.

Points to consider with storage of Metadata:
- ever tried to make Metadata portable across numerous devices, external scraped Metadata if far quicker and easier to build a library again when this is the case.

- portability, pick up a HDD and take it to a friends place and all Metadata is there ready to go

- ever had RPi SD card corruption issues that destroy a local library with Metadata stored locally then lost as well

- if you have a large library, try letting a RPi (particularily the B/B+) scrape that locally across a slow internet connection. It might complete if you leave it overnight.