[elwood]

I decided to take the plunge and do some maintenance tonight.
Upgraded the firmware, formatted the drive (from the iHP menu) and recopied everything using the XCOPY method and recreated the DB using iHPtools. Also, as I am now using SyncBack, as recommended by people here, I can exclude all the thumbnail-related files which serve a purpose on the PC but not on the iHP and so cut down the number of files on the iHP.

Startup without the DB is a massive improvement. Down from about 26 secs to about 8 secs.

With DB... too long to be practical. Something like 3 minutes, but I stopped looking after 2 minutes.

But I'm happy because I don't really feel the need to use the database, and the bootup time was my No 1 gripe with the -120.

For reference, there are just under 7500 songs in about 900 directories. About 15.5 Gb used on the 20Gb drive.

I imagine that any improvement from the firmware upgrade is negligible and thats its nearly all down to having the directory structure at the start of the drive. Not sure if removing the redundant thumbnails helps speed it up, but it certainly gives me more space.