| Bruce. 2007-07-30, 12:33 pm |
| As I've posted here before, adding a ton of MP3s to a SD card does slow the
"boot to map draw" speed. Someone suggested that placing the MP3s in a
zillion subdirectories would help and I just tested that. They also
suggested formatting with a FAT32 allocation size of 32K (default is 4K) and
I also tried that. Here are my results. I start timing at power on time,
press Accept on the disclamer, press View Map, and stop timing when the 3D
map finishes drawing.
No SD card: 18 seconds
750 songs in the root directory: 80 seconds (ouch!)
750 songs in hundreds of directories: 48 seconds
750 songs in hundreds of directories using a 32K block size: 41 seconds.
Note that XP would not let me specify a allocation block (cluster) size of
64K. 32K was the biggest I could use.
So despite making no sense to me, this did work exactly as I heard. Having
to process a zillion subdirectories is indeed faster than a single
directory. I ended up with 750 files in 272 folders.
The 32K allocation block size also helped but not as much as the multiple
subdirectories. The combination of the 2 cut my boot time almost in half.
Bruce.
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