Launchbox running from SSD vs Internal mechanical vs USB 3

[ckp]

Hi,

Currently I have my entire LB folder, giant collection of ROMs, and all media on the same 5TB (nearly full) usb 3 drive plugged into a usb 3 port with Win 10.

I'm wondering if anyone has some test results for possible LB performance improvement if LB is running from these various types of drives?

And how much of LB would you need to have on something like an SSD to see a big improvement? Like include everything but the game roms? Or can a small bit of LB being moved help out?

I'm trying to avoid moving many gigs of data to my SSD but still see a performance improvement? If I should see a pretty good improvement, it may be worth going through the LB xml to reconfigure a bunch of paths. I have my roms, videos, and emulators outside of the LB folder. But the LB folder is still huge from art and image cache and stuff.

Thanks.

[CADScott]

You will see a VERY big improvement running LaunchBox from your SSD.  I have my install on my SSD with my games, videos and manuals on my mechanical drive, and I use Symbolic links to set the paths, rather than changing the paths in LaunchBox.

I notice a huge speed increase in loading images as the cache is running from the SSD, I don't have any benchmarks, but it is very noticable.

Have a look at this thread, it will give you all the info you need to use symlinks: 

 

[fromlostdays]

Can confirm. Recently purchased a 500 gig SSD. It's not flawless, mostly because it still takes time to load all the box art from the cache, but where I noticed an incredible improvement was just scrolling through the games/boxes. Before, there was a shutter, akin to a framerate drop in a game. Now, they transition immaculate. No regrets. 

[ckp]

Thanks for confirming. If it's really just the image cache folder that is the big difference, it would be better and easier for me to simply redirect (symlink) the current cache folder on my usb drive to my ssd drive and have only the cache there. I think this would make my LB more portable and easier to work with.

Do you guys know if it's really just the cache folder? I think I'll try this experiment.

[ckp]

So, I renamed (to cache__) my cache folder on the usb drive which is 6.5GB. Then I ran mklink to redirect to my ssd drive. Then I ran robocopy to quickly copy over all the usb cache files to the new location on the ssd drive in case LB would recreate all the files much slower.

Then I ran LB. I don't really notice a difference in Bigbox, but I never really had much of a performance issue in the wheel and games using Bigbox.

In regular LB, it seems like the game images are all there right away when clicking on each platform, but there is still a fairly long hourglass pause when clicking a platform. Once the hourglass passes, it's readily usable.

So I don't see a super huge difference, but I'll keep it this way for now. I renamed the original cache folder and kept it with all the image files so I can use it if I ever move the usb drive to another computer temporarily.

 

[CADScott]

It would be interesting to try making a copy of all your LaunchBox files on the SSD (except for the games). You should find much better performance, though it might also depend on the specs of your system overall.  Both my systems are pretty beefy, so the mechanical storage is definitely the bottleneck.

It also depends on how many games you actually have in your collection, my laptop has a small subset of my main collection, and it is very much faster.

 

I might try doing some real benchmarks of this when I have a chance.

Edited August 30, 2016 by CADScott

[ckp]

My system is very strong, but putting everything on the SSD might be a pain fixing all the paths to everything. Also I don't want to use a lot of space on my SSD for this stuff.

It runs well enough as is, but maybe another simple change or two may come up to improve it. Thanks!