Wild Idea: USB Dongle to speed up HD200 UI

[Brent]

I'm curious about the use of a USB dongle with the HD200 as additional memory for the device.
1. One use could be to for Media Player (standalone) mode to allow for more media items to be imported and therefore eliminating the limitation.
2. The other use (the one I care more about) would be to use the USB flash drive for additional Extender memory for the HD200 to use. The thought is that it could give the HD200 additional firepower do deal with more animations and such on the UI side of things.

Do either of these ideas have any merit? Would additional memory help with the situation described in #2?

[bigo93bronco]

I hope they just make a future version someday that has an empty laptop memory slot or something so that the end user has the option to increase its memory on their own if needed. Seems like it wouldn't cost much to include.

[Lucas]

Originally Posted by Brent

Would additional memory help with the situation described in #2?

I suspect not because most USB memory sticks are not fast enough to augment the system memory. It could actually slow things down.

[reggie14]

It doesn't seem like memory would be a limiting factor when doing animations. The HD200 already has a fair amount of RAM. Even if it where, I would think flash memory like that would be too slow to help with animations.

I suppose you could use a flash drive to cache information that would otherwise have to be sent over the network. You could thumbnails, and possibly menu items. I'm not sure how much this would help though. You'd need a pretty fast USB flash drive to do noticeably better than 100mbit ethernet, though latency should improve.

Some recent updates to the stock UI do some prefetching to help performance when doing things like page-up/page-down. But, I haven't tried the stock UI lately, so I don't know how it compares to SageMC. I know SageMC has some sort of thumbnail cache, though I don't really know what that does. But, its almost certainly not a cache on the extender (I assume its a cache of resized thumbnails, but that's just a guess). I do experience a detectable lag when I hit page-down in my music library. It's not long by any means, just detectable.

I think its also an interesting idea to use a flash drive as the storage location for the media library database when operating in standalone mode. I would really think there'd be a way of doing that, but I expect there would be a moderately significant performance penalty. Are very many people actually hitting that limit now?