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Simple Hard Drive Question

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iamnaeth:

Wow, don't check the thread for a few days and there's a flurry of activity.  The reason I want / need > than 250 GB is primarily because of Dreamcast Isos and CHDs.  I have a lot of dreamcast games that I love playing that are perfect for the arcade.  (Capcom Vs. SNK 2 anyone?)

So with this quote in mind:


--- Quote from: DashRendar on March 15, 2010, 03:28:07 pm ---Yep, SATA for this purpose is overkill.  USB 2.0 should be fine (35 MB/sec).

--- End quote ---

What about USB 1.0?  For DC and CHD and etc.  We're not talking JUST MAME here.  Thank you all!



WhereEaglesDare:


--- Quote from: iamnaeth on March 15, 2010, 06:29:07 pm ---
What about USB 1.0?  For DC and CHD and etc.  We're not talking JUST MAME here.  Thank you all!

--- End quote ---

I don't think USB 1 will work as you want it to, it will run, and you can play, but you will be disappointed and it may lag on some games.  If you dont have the USB 2 Infrastructure on your board then again I can't say enough nice things about the RC-212 on NewEgg for a SATA Interface.

Haze:

The main issue I've found with external USB drives is heat.  Most of the cases have really bad cooling, and if you leave them on too long they'll get far too hot and end up dying (heat seems to be the #1 reason for early HDD death, aside from dropping them of course)

With that said I've had pretty good luck with the new Samsung 'EcoGreen' drives in external cases recently, they spin slower than regular drives (5400RPM vs 7200) , which also means they run cooler and thus I feel more confident in them not overheating.  For mass storage of things reliability is obviously more important than performance.

USB isn't the fastest, but for most things it's sufficient.  I can run the Laserdisc CHD games over USB without issue, and as far as streaming performance is concerned those are the most demanding things in MAME (and probably more demanding than your average HD video anyway)  If you don't have USB2 support then you really need an additional card tho, be it ESATA or USB.  USB1.0 / 1.1 are SLOW, and you'll get bored even just trying to transfer stuff to the drive.

Recent Seagate drives are terrible, they seem to be the worst of the bunch for overheating, so I'd avoid them at all costs.  Older Maxtor drives were similar (and Seagate's quality nosedived as soon as they bought Maxtor and started using their fabs)  As another poster here has said, the 1.5Tb Seagates are shocking, even with adequate cooling they're highly unreliable, I gave up even bothering to RMA the ones I had because the replacements would barely last 2 months.


protokatie:

Just a little recap with some redundant information:

External drives via USB 2.0 will be fine. If the computer you have has only USB 1.1 then it is prolly time to upgrade it as it must be more than a decade old (IE don't expect it to live much longer, for 300 bucks you can get a low end new PC which will prevent many of the problems with PS's and whatnot)

External drives overheating: I have greendrives for my fileserver. They have no fan, but are cased in thick aluminum. No problems with overheating at all, even tho they are close to the radiator.

External drives spin down: This could be a problem. The greendrives I have will spin down after 5 minutes of no access. This can be circumvented by writing a simple batch file that copies an 80 meg file to the drive, then deletes it and repeates this every 3 minutes or so.

Drive manufacture: This is one of those "he said, she said" issues for the most part. Until recently, most people would praise Toyota for her efficient and well designed cars. 5 years from now, we may not even remember the current problems. This same thing hold true for Hdds.

External Hdds should work fine for you, except for the USB 1.1 interface (there is no USB 1.0 released AFAIK)(IE get a system that has USB 2.0). Find a decent model, preferably one with a metal case (heat) and keep backups of your data regardless. Trust me on that last bit.

DashRendar:

Good advice there Proto.

I chose to use an external USB drive to hold all my roms, mp3s, emulators, and front end.  The internal C: drive is where Windows resides.

With this setup, I can remove the external drive, hook it up to my regular (online) PC, download more to it, update the files if I want to, or simply have a very mobile solution for the bulk of my files.  My cab PC is very very lean as a result (faster boot times, fewer problems, etc).

Kinda handy.

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