[ekurin]

I've been running XBMC Live of a 2GB Kingston USB Drive for a while. As you might imagine 2GB gets filled up and it's time to expand. I'm looking at 4GB which I think is sufficent for my userdata.

However I'm thinking about running XBMC of a Compact Flash card via a CF->Sata adapter and I would like some input from people who has experience from CF. I'm particularly interested in the required transfer rate of the CF card. Is around 20 MB/s read/write sufficient for running XBMC with a backdrop intense skin? Or would I be looking for a 40MB/s read/write?

[xbmcbubba]

I have the latest XBMC Live running from a SATA-CF adapter using a basic Kingston 4GB CF card. ($22 version locally)

For XBMC itself, I really don't think that data rate from the card is relevant, as there is very little disk activity once it is running. I can't imagine that any process (other than playback) that uses local storage resources can require much in the way of SATA bandwidth. The bottleneck, if any, will be the application itself fetching and processing the stored data.


I did find that there is an aggravating initial delay with the main XBMC menus, as if the system won't cache the various menu background images until requested, so you get a stutter when initally navigating the menu choices. Seems a bit pointless when they could be easily pre-cached, based on available RAM.