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When my Media Center was new the Recorded TV loaded in a flash, but now with about 750GB of recorded material it takes about 5-10 seconds to display. The slowdown has been gradual as more material has been added to the library.

Is there any way to speed this up? I would've thought that there was some service that monitored the Recorded TV folder(s) and maintained a list of what was there, along with thumbnails, so that it could be displayed quickly. Surely it doesn't scan the folders everytime?

The recordings are shared over two drives, both 5400rpm SATA drives (320GB boot, 1TB data), which I appreciate are never going to be the fastest. I have considered moving all the TV to the larger drive to see if that speeds things up, might this help?

What I'm really hoping for that there is some way in which this data might be more effectively cached. Or something.

Rest of system

  • Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz
  • 2GB RAM
  • Vista Home Premium

2 Answers 2

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Sort of obvious, but have you considered upgrading to Windows 7? Media Center has a lot of improvements in 7.

You might also check on The Green Button forums to see if any other users have ideas about giant media libraries and performance:

http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/default.aspx

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  • Two kids, a wife and mortgage mean that even £60 for a Windows 7 upgrade was vetoed on ROI grounds :(
    – Lunatik
    Jan 15, 2010 at 11:38
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I am running a similar spec'ed but not quite as fast machine (Core 2 Duo 1.8). I have over a TB in recorded video on a Samsung ECO Green drive (which isn't exactly a speed demon, but might be faster than your 5400 drive) and I never see this behavior.

If you get slow response while playing but not recording, likely not a drive issue. I have been able to record two HD streams while watching a third and never an issue. About the only time I have seen slow behavior is just after I set up my (reinstall) and pointed the TV Recording to my 1.5 TB drive. The "import" took a few minutes.

I agree with Jeff, Win7 might be the key here.

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  • I'll second/third that. Recorded TV is loading much faster for me since I upgraded to Windows 7.
    – Scott
    Feb 2, 2010 at 15:58

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