I've been using the Touch for a few monthes now. At the beginning, I used TinySBS with an external usb 500GB usb powered (about 150 GB of flac files). I was somewhat happy, but I finally gave up using internal server.
The main reason is that rescanning happens far too often, and is unnacceptably slow if it happens when you don't expect it. I don't want to leave my usb drive permanently connected, because I sometimes want to take it with me, or connect it to my PC. Anyway, I have the feeling that, even if you leave it connected, you sometimes have unexpected rescanning of the drive. The software of the Touch is not totally reliable. I have very strange behavior with the alarm for example. So sometimes you have to restart the server, and the scanning starts again. That would not be very annoying, if you could perform scan only on demand. But those intempestive rescanning happen too often to be acceptable. Library scan should happen only on demand, when you have time to wait for the scan to complete. My library usually doesn't change every week, and even not every month. Ideally, we should be able to generate the database with a fast PC on the external DD, and use it with TinySBS without rescan. This is a pity, because I guess it would be so simple to set up this behavior in the Touch. Another point : My usb DD worked fine with the Touch (well, with some lengthy unexpected rescan of the library) for several weeks. But one day, I heard some strange noises during a rescan, and the Touch finally refused to read the disk. I thought the disk was dead (and those noises were obviously the sign of dangerous actions in the disk). But the disk works fine with my PC, and is still working without any problem on the PC, several weeks after that. I suspect the support of NTFS is not good in the Touch. It was added lately, because some people, including me, said that it was not acceptable to release a product which doesn't support NTFS nowadays (I still think this is true). But I fear that the way the Touch read the disk is dangerous for it. Programmers are usualy aware that a specific software, accessing disks in a certain way, moving the head very fast from very distant locations, can kill a disk quite rapidly. May be this is this kind of behaviour that I heard. So, even if I was quite happy with TinySBS for a few weeks, I don't use it anymore. Or only sometimes with a USB Stick, no more that 8GB. Please, if someone could understand that scanning should happen only on demand (no matter if a few added files are not yet updated meanwhile) that would be great. Don't tell me this is overcomplicated to develop ... As far as I'm concerned, it would be a dramatic improvement, and would not give the feeling that internal server is an experimental toy for geeks. And why not allow the database to be computed by a PC, and used as it is when you plug the disk to the Touch ? This is a pity, because apart from this TinySBS thing, the Touch is great, and a very good replacement for the Classic. I have some problems with alarm sometimes, but I'm globally very happy with it otherwise. -- nicolas75 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ nicolas75's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15823 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81784 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
