Roms folder outside of Launchbox?

[CapSwey]

Hi, I'm using LB/BB for some time now and enjoying it a lot. So much, that my library has maybe become a bit to large. 🤔

I used to run LB on a 500GB SSD, but needed to switch to one of my spinning HDD's because of the increased library size. My setup is like this atm:

- Total roms about 14.000
- Total space LB with content about 2.5TB
- Launchbox and all content except Windows games on a 4TB HDD S-ATA drive.
- Windows games on a seperate 500GB M.2 SSD (game shortcuts in LB games folder) 

I'm running on:
Windows 11
Intel i7-14700K 3.4Ghz
64GB DDR5
RTX 4060Ti 8GB

What can I do to speed LB up? I'm not sure if LB feels slower then before (esspecially with loading game information like video's) and if it's because of the size of the content, or the change from SSD to spinning HDD?
Is it possible to place the games on the spinning HDD and LB on an SSD, so all information content is loaded faster? Anything else you guys recommend I change to this setup to speed things up?

Thanks a lot for the help and/or advice and keep up all the great work with LB! 

Edited July 14 by CapSwey

[sundogak]

For LB, the main thing is media cache on SSD to speed up scrolling.  LB places compressed/cached images in this folder.  Thus, you can either put LB entirely on SSD or set up symlinks for the two cache folders in the LB image directory to your SSD and place LB on a hard drive (snip below of my symlinked cached folders to SSD).  The cache won't help with videos.  Videos slow things down in either SSD or HD cases but local SSD will be more responsive. You could go to bother or moving videos to SSD and then edit platform to modify the folder path for videos to SSD location; but somewhat a hassle if have lots of platforms.  But may be something to try on one or two platforms and see if any improvement.  There are a couple threads in forum on speeding things up but the nutshell is keeping things simple in by LB by basic images (logo, cover art, a few snaps), simple theme, and no videos will improve scrolling simply because less for LB to manage. 

Beyond that, the loading of games off a HD (or via NAS) won't be that much different vs SSD for most games or at least worth the hassle of mitigating. I have seen some folks go through gyration of copying the game to SSD from HD to then load it but that seems overly complicated to me for relatively minimal benefit. As to the comment on roms in LB folder, that is immaterial speed wise if in LB folder or not (if on same drive type).  Comes down to the HD/SSD speed and the emulator loading process not the folder location. 

[CapSwey]

sundogak thank you so much for your thorough explanation, really aporeciated!

Things are a lot more clear now on how it works. Perhaps I give the video -> SSD a go or disable the videos entirely as you suggested. Further I'm going to read through some of the speed related threads as well. 

Thanks again, very helpfull!  👍 👍