[HOW TO] Get The Best PRIME 4 Search Speeds

In order to get the quickest search results in PRIME 4, we’ve listed some top tips to get you searching 1000’s of tracks with quick and accurate results.

  1. PRIME 4 supports a 2.5" SATA hard drive; either HDD or SSD. We’d recommend SSD as they are not only more reliable due to no moving mechanical parts, but they also have much quicker read/write speeds than your conventional spinning disk drive.

  2. Choose a well-known brand drive like Sandisk, Samsung, Crucial, Intenso, WD.

  3. All storage media connected to the PRIME 4 should be formatted to either FAT32 or exFAT with an MBR (Master Boot Record) style partition structure. For larger file systems (1TB and greater) we recommend formatting drives to the exFAT format.

  4. There is no drive capacity size limitation, this is to support DJs with larger uncompressed file collections (WAV, AIFF, FLAC etc).

  5. The size of your collection will impact search speed results. The larger the collection, the more metadata to search. We have tested collections up to 50’000 songs with good results. If your collection is larger than 50’000, we’d recommend either splitting your collection into 2 separate devices or partitions.

  6. Ensure your collection is fully analyzed by Engine Prime before transferring to the drive.

  7. PRIME 4 allows you to search within a variety of track metadata fields such as Artist, Title, Album, Comment etc… To reduce the search result time, tap the down arrow next to the search field magnifying glass. This will allow you to enable or disable metadata search fields by tapping them. Disable all fields that are not required for your search criteria.

  8. If you use the search field regularly, you may find plugging in an external USB keyboard helpful, a handy shortcut to use is CTRL + F to bring up the search page on PRIME 4.

We hope this helps you understand how to get the best search results from your PRIME 4 and any connected devices.

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Well said, I have a 40k track collection on a Crucial external USB3 SSD and searches on the SC5000’s are virtually instant even when returning lots of results, im assuming it would be the same on the Prime 4 :slight_smile:

I believe Denon should be recommending everyone to use exfat over fat32 where possible as the database can easily go over the 4gb fat32 limit, my DB is over 6gb for 40k tracks!

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