Philips GoGear HDD6330: Extremely slow song load time

[tuba_man]

Hi everyone!

I've just loaded rockbox on my GoGear and I'm noticing that it takes a very long time to start playing music.  During the wait, it usually sounds like the hard drive is chugging away at least, so I think it's probably not a drive failure yet.

When I load up a playlist or individual song, it takes anywhere from 10-15 seconds to start playing low bitrate MP3s, up to several minutes for FLAC files.  Reducing the Anti-Skip buffer to 5sec seems to have shortened that time some, but not significantly.  Turning off album art doesn't seem to affect the time at all. 

Today's build (Mar 9, 2011) seems to load slightly faster than a build I had loaded from last month.

Other options that don't seem to change load times:

* Different WPS selections
* Directory Cache
* Database Load to RAM
* Update Database on Startup
* Directory/Playlist limits
* Disk spindown

Any ideas on what to check next?
Post Merge: March 09, 2011, 09:54:36 PMProgress update:

Reformatting the drive / partition (As FAT32, Default allocation unit size) just about doubled transfer rates.

I went from about 4.5 MB/s when backing up to around 9 when restoring.

This also appears to have improved access times for the database and for album art.  Unfortunately, this has not improved song load times.

As a side note that is potentially related:  During these long pauses, the interface is unresponsive, it appears locked up for long periods as well.  The HDD6330's 'click' noise still happens when hitting buttons, and eventually it begins responding to commands again.

[tuba_man]

Update:  I've improved the situation to an acceptable level.  Updating the rockbox build helped a bit.  A combination of turning off the anti-skip buffer, a WPS with no album art, and turning of DB Load to RAM seems to have straightened things out.  It's certainly not perfect, and skipping more than one or two tracks in a row really throws things out of whack, but it's much improved.