It seems that recently there is a much longer delay on recognizing voice commands. For instance, when I command "birdview map" it waits about 5-6 seconds before changing. When I got the car there was only about a 1-2 second delay. The only thing I can think of different is that I have filled up my hard drive on the Music Box. Anyone else notice this?

I haven't noticed any lag in the voice commands, however my MB isn't anywhere close to being full either. Maybe the HD needs defragmented!

Did you do any voice training? I wonder if it takes longer once trained to do the lookup in a database....

Not sure - Min Voice feedback reduces the response to your input - but probably not the lookup time.
I've set mine to this, and when you hit steering wheel button it's just a beep - it also reduces other annoyingly long inquisitions. Try it, you'll like it.

Not really... that only reduces how much the car talks to you and not really how long it takes to process voice commands. So instead of getting the whole "Say a command [beep]" -- you only get "[beep]"

I'm using reduced feedback for months now... Got tired of the prompts.

I wouldn't doubt that this would be a problem, but it depends on how the HD is set up. There's already an option to empty the trash (or purge deleted items or whatever it's called), so there's probably some house-keeping to be done. A hard drive will get defragmented regardless... I don't think that would affect music playback but if all the voice commands and stuff is on the same partition then it could be bad juju in the long run.

I have all kinds of crazy ideas of one day -- after the warranty is up -- to crack open the car and plug the HD into a machine and see how much real modding can be done...

That's actually not true. There are filesystems out there that don't fragment.. or at least they do, but the filesystem handles it transparently (meaning it fixes itself). ext3, reiserfs, XFS, JFS, NTFS, etc all do this.

I won't go too far off topic, but that's an urban legend, esp when dealing with NTFS and JFS/ext3. The problem with NTFS was obviously Microsoft, and we all know that even to this day NTFS suffers from fragmentation problems regardless of what Microsoft says...

If you look at something like fibmap ( http://www.informatik.uni-frankfurt....fs/fibmap.html ) it was specifically written to deal with ext3, and while the OS might handle it "better" than most variants of Windows, doesn't mean that fragmentation is not there and that it doesn't affect performance.

A disk that is 20-30% fragmented will affect performance when you try to read data in it no matter what.

Getting back on track...

Assuming (and that's a BIG assumption) that whoever came up with the nav/media stuff for Infiniti decided to use the same partition on the hard drive for navigation data, music and to store voice prompts/voice recognition stuff, it shouldn't be affected by disk fragmentation since it's not moved and it's probably sitting in one block.

But I would guess that reading data or performing lookups for phrases/address book voicetags/etc will probably suffer from reduced performance if it's stored along with the Music Box data and the drive is never defragmented. It's only common sense.

Yeah. Let's keep in on topic, but I have to get my last word :P

It's nice to see a fellow IT worker on the forums.

Good article on it would be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_fragmentation

I think in this case we're both "correct." However, without knowing what FS the computer is running, it's impossible to say. I've actually contemplated removing the disk to see what can be done with it... but I'm leasing so I haven't gotten the cojones to open it up.

Cool...

Like I said, when my warranty is up -- and I grow some ***** -- I'll remove the disk and hook it up to a desktop and see how much damage I can do.

It would be REALLY interesting if there was some OS-related stuff on it... change the skins, allow the Music Box to read WMA... oh... the possibilities are endless.

Do you think the disk is located behind the center console? I don't even have a service manual.

The link to the pdf version is somewhere on this site... I have it but I don't have my USB drive with me.

I'll check later and see... I don't think they put too much stuff on the hard drive but it only makes sense that the nav data is in there somewhere and perhaps some of the interface components.

It would be interesting if nothing else just to see if you can check the fragmentation between a new(ish) empty drive and another one with a ton of music in the music box to see...

Just looked up the site and downloaded it. It is indeed in the AV control unit directly behind the the center console, and below the display unit. I also have the removal instructions. Question is, do I have what it takes to pull the trigger?

Duplicate the drive, using dd, or ghost, then mess with the copy. See if it'll even read from the copy... Perhaps you can use a larger drive and free up some more space for the music box. Also, it'd be rockin to change various stuff.

Also, try issuing commands with the moonroof and windows closed.

I find the system gets less confused when there is absolutely NO background noise going on.