Simple Hard Drive Question

[iamnaeth]

I want to expand the storage capacity on the PC in my arcade so that I can add some more games / videos / etc.  Unfortunately, the PC is rather dated and only has IDE connections.  I wanted to add ~1TB more space.  So my question is simple.  Are USB external hard drives stable enough for regular use and is the connection fast enough to not cause a lag while playing?  If the answer to both of those is yes, can anyone recommend a good hard drive?  Thank you!

Nate

[Ginsu Victim]

I have a 250 GB IDE in mine and still have 180 GB free.

Obviously I don't care about the CHDs (I only have a few), but I've got complete MAME, SNES, NES, Genesis, TG-16, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, Zinc, and Daphne collections, plus a variety of PSX games and Doujin-soft shooters. Also I have artwork and video for everything.

How much stuff do you really need on one cabinet? Mine already has a lot that I never touch.

[darcyp]

ive used external drives a lot, and ive never had a problem with them being slow or anything.
The only time where they are is if it not being used and kind of goes into standby mode, and the drive has to essentially boot up before it does anything.

[EwJ]

If you're concerned about lag with USB and can't get the capacity you need even with multiple IDE drives (?), if you have a free PCI slot, throw a PCI SATA card in there.

[ubiquityman]

USB is very slow compared to SATA.
I'd recommend you spend $20 and get a PCI SATA card.

[mvsfan]

I want to expand the storage capacity on the PC in my arcade so that I can add some more games / videos / etc.  Unfortunately, the PC is rather dated and only has IDE connections.  I wanted to add ~1TB more space.  So my question is simple.  Are USB external hard drives stable enough for regular use and is the connection fast enough to not cause a lag while playing?  If the answer to both of those is yes, can anyone recommend a good hard drive?  Thank you!

Your difference will only really be Apparent when your loading a game up, because of the way Mame works. it loads your rom into memory first, off of the hard drive. then it will play as fast as your processor and Ram will let it. Except for Chd's you really dont need new hardware.

so if you dont mind waiting for it to load in the first place, their isnt a problem. Does anyone remember Sega Cd? yes, they tried full cinematic games like Night Trap, problem was that they constantly accessed the cd drive and you had to wait and wait and wait just to get a small bit of action. The best use of that platform was simple (but Long) games like Sonic CD where once a level loaded, (rather quickly) it got dumped to the sega cds Ram first, and it was full speed ahead until the next level had to load. its basically the same with Mame.

Oh, also to mention is that if you dont like to wait a bit or if loading is painfully slow, you can always get a Sata card. Just dont expect the same performance as onboard Sata, although it will be better than ide.

Nate

[mvsfan]

I want to expand the storage capacity on the PC in my arcade so that I can add some more games / videos / etc.  Unfortunately, the PC is rather dated and only has IDE connections.  I wanted to add ~1TB more space.  So my question is simple.  Are USB external hard drives stable enough for regular use and is the connection fast enough to not cause a lag while playing?  If the answer to both of those is yes, can anyone recommend a good hard drive?  Thank you!

Your difference will only really be Apparent when your loading a game up, because of the way Mame works. it loads your rom into memory first, off of the hard drive. then it will play as fast as your processor and Ram will let it. Except for Chd's you really dont need new hardware.

so if you dont mind waiting for it to load in the first place, their isnt a problem. Does anyone remember Sega Cd? yes, they tried full cinematic games like Night Trap, problem was that they constantly accessed the cd drive and you had to wait and wait and wait just to get a small bit of action. The best use of that platform was simple (but Long) games like Sonic CD where once a level loaded, (rather quickly) it got dumped to the sega cds Ram first, and it was full speed ahead until the next level had to load. its basically the same with Mame.

Oh, also to mention is that if you dont like to wait a bit or if loading is painfully slow, you can always get a Sata card. Just dont expect the same performance as onboard Sata, although it will be better than ide.

also id never use a usb drive for anything besides backup, they are just too slow.

if you do go for an external hard drive to back things up, get something like a western digital that has USB, and ESATA. some even have firewire too.
that way, your covered on all bases.

[WhereEaglesDare]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132009&Tpk=rc-212

I have used a couple of these in file servers I have built, they work great (in WinXP, haven't tried vista or 7 yet)  Real easy to configure, and VERY RELIABLE.  Plus, it has an extra IDE connector so you could potentially add 4 more drives just from this card, 2 SATA + 2 IDE.  For 20 (This Card) and 80 bucks you got 1 TB SATA internal, when the externals are about the same price, but I think this is much more reliable than any external.

and if you are going to buy a new hard drive ONLY BUY WESTERN DIGITAL AND NEVER BUY A  SEAGATE.

[mvsfan]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132009&Tpk=rc-212

I have used a couple of these in file servers I have built, they work great (in WinXP, haven't tried vista or 7 yet)  Real easy to configure, and VERY RELIABLE.  Plus, it has an extra IDE connector so you could potentially add 4 more drives just from this card, 2 SATA + 2 IDE.  For 20 (This Card) and 80 bucks you got 1 TB SATA internal, when the externals are about the same price, but I think this is much more reliable than any external.

and if you are going to buy a new hard drive ONLY BUY WESTERN DIGITAL AND NEVER BUY A  SEAGATE.

actually the only thing i like equal or better than WD is MAXTOR. both have been nothing but rock solid reliability over the years for me.

as far as customer support goes, i dont suppose anyone remembers Maxtor Maxblast software.

Maxtor Maxblast was the absolute ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- until someone somewhere decided that it should only support maxtor drives.

now, the only way to go is the Ultimate boot cd.

[WhereEaglesDare]

now, the only way to go is the Ultimate boot cd.

Agreed, I got it on a bootable thumbdrive since all types of hard media is obsolete, CD,DVDs, even BluRays, obsolete.

[mvsfan]

now, the only way to go is the Ultimate boot cd.

Agreed, I got it on a bootable thumbdrive since all types of hard media is obsolete, CD,DVDs, even BluRays, obsolete.

Blu Ray was Obsolete when it came out, as was Hd Dvd.

The main testament to that are the simple facts that nobody really noticed a huge difference if any at all when it came out.

when Dvds came out they were completely the answer to everybodys complaints about VHS.

When VHS came out, it provided many answers to peoples complaints about BETA.

Their isnt a very large difference between DVD and Blue Ray however, Hence the slow adoption of it.

Of course, if your looking to store data, Blue ray offers a larger capacity than DVD.

But with all of the increasingly larger and larger Solid state devices appearing on the market, your options and dollars are much better spent to pass on Blu Ray.

[WhereEaglesDare]

Of course then the eventual conclusion is that even thumb drives will be obsolete and all data will be transferred over the internet through some sort of share drive or cloud network.

[Warborg]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132009&Tpk=rc-212

I have used a couple of these in file servers I have built, they work great (in WinXP, haven't tried vista or 7 yet)  Real easy to configure, and VERY RELIABLE.  Plus, it has an extra IDE connector so you could potentially add 4 more drives just from this card, 2 SATA + 2 IDE.  For 20 (This Card) and 80 bucks you got 1 TB SATA internal, when the externals are about the same price, but I think this is much more reliable than any external.

and if you are going to buy a new hard drive ONLY BUY WESTERN DIGITAL AND NEVER BUY A  SEAGATE.

It's interesting how a few tainted experiences condemn a whole brand... 

I work on PCs constantly, been building/maintaning/supporting PCs for the better part of 20 years...  And I've seen different brands go through their highs and lows.  Currently, I've had the best successes with Seagate, using them in multiple systems for years and friends PCs as well without a single failure.  Good success with WD, but had a couple of very odd compatibility issues with their 1TB Black Edition drive to the point where I had to pop it in a different system as the one I was installing it on just didn't want to tolerate it...  And lastly, Maxtor...  I haven't used their drives in a while now, and the main reason for that is when I DID use them, I had almost every single one die prematurely.

[Blanka]

For general retro gaming, the avarage USB drive is probably faster than the original roms. For most use the speed will be perfectly adequate.

[mwong168]

I have all my roms shared on my media server which I access via drive map on my HTPC, netbook, laptop, bartop and showcase arcade.  Works great and takes an extra few seconds to load (only for games that have CHD's) but at least I don't have to worry about updating my roms in 5 seperate places.  Also my media server has 18tb so space will not be an issue for a while 

[bpark42]

It's interesting how a few tainted experiences condemn a whole brand... 

I work on PCs constantly, been building/maintaning/supporting PCs for the better part of 20 years...  And I've seen different brands go through their highs and lows.  Currently, I've had the best successes with Seagate, using them in multiple systems for years and friends PCs as well without a single failure.  Good success with WD, but had a couple of very odd compatibility issues with their 1TB Black Edition drive to the point where I had to pop it in a different system as the one I was installing it on just didn't want to tolerate it...  And lastly, Maxtor...  I haven't used their drives in a while now, and the main reason for that is when I DID use them, I had almost every single one die prematurely.

Recent Seagate drives had a prevalent and well-documented firmware issue that often resulted in a bricked drive.  I recently had two drives die within a week of each other.  The first was a Maxtor that died a noisy death, the second was a seagate that just suddenly disappeared from the system to the point where the BIOS would not even detect it. 

I researched the issue with the Seagate and discovered the firmware bug that can randomly cause the drive to get stuck in a busy state.  This bug affected a large number of their recent drives.  That's bad enough, but bugs happen....but what has really put me off on Seagate was the fact that they did very little to support the problem they created.  They replaced the drives for some people if they were under warranty, but in general would not fix the problem drive itself, at least not for less than $1000 or so.

Anyhow, my real point is that any drive can have problems.  Pretty much all the brands have had problems recently as they have done everything they can to cut costs and price in a competetive fashion.  Space is cheap these days.  Buy multiple drives and do regular backups and/or set up RAID 1/5/6 etc. arrays.


And on the original topic, a usb 2 drive will be slow compared to sata, but it should be more than sufficient to serve up roms.

[DashRendar]

Yep, SATA for this purpose is overkill.  USB 2.0 should be fine (35 MB/sec).

[Encryptor]

Recent Seagate drives had a prevalent and well-documented firmware issue that often resulted in a bricked drive.  I recently had two drives die within a week of each other.  The first was a Maxtor that died a noisy death, the second was a seagate that just suddenly disappeared from the system to the point where the BIOS would not even detect it. 

I researched the issue with the Seagate and discovered the firmware bug that can randomly cause the drive to get stuck in a busy state.  This bug affected a large number of their recent drives.  That's bad enough, but bugs happen....but what has really put me off on Seagate was the fact that they did very little to support the problem they created.  They replaced the drives for some people if they were under warranty, but in general would not fix the problem drive itself, at least not for less than $1000 or so.

Personally I used to like Seagate drives. But I wouldn't buy one now for one reason. Seagate is now owned by Maxtor and my personal opinion is Maxtor drives are JUNK! I've replaced many of them at work. Too many of them for me to have any faith in either of them.

Encryptor

[mwong168]

+1 on the Seagate drives being bad.  I build HTPC's for friends and family on the side and last year Seagate was the only drive available in 1.5tb.  So I spoke to my friend and he gave me a green light instead of waiting for Western Digital and both drives have failed.  The first one crapped out after 5 weeks and was RMA'ed and then shortly after getting the replacement the other drive went in less than 3 months    I checked and made sure firmware was current but still no good.  I had another friend buy a brand new 1tb seagate and again it died so not sure if it can be coincidence that these were the only bad apples?  I had two 1.5tb Seagates which ran fine for 3 months in my media server but after I heard these stories from my friends I quickly offloaded them and swapped them equivalent WD 1.5tb and which have now all been replaced with 2tb Hitachi drives.  I guess the same can be said about Hitachi and their "deathstar" incident many years ago but that was when IBM owned them but since then I believe things have changed and knock on wood all my 2tb drives are running smoothly without any problems.

One thing about the Seagate drives is they made be really paranoid because of how noisy they were compared to the WD and Samsung drives.  I ran a thorough scan disk and nothing came up so everything was fine but still didn't want to take a chance and took a $15 hit per drive and sold them on craigslist.  Don't even get me started on Maxtor drives    We have a box of around 100+ drives of this particular Maxtor model.



Most of them are good but I would only trust using them either for test environments or a RAID setup.  We had a client that had Dell Optiflex's in his stores and after a few of them died he decided to be proactive and just use Ghost to image the Maxtor drives to Western Digitals and he was so upset he didn't even want the drives back after we swapped them out.  He said burn em' 

[DeLuSioNal29]

Here's what I'd do.  I'd buy a bigger IDE drive, then use the imaging software that it comes with (usually on CD - programs like Maxblast) to make an exact copy of your existing drive to the new one.  Then use the new drive and keep the older smaller one as a backup.  It's very easy to do and has a built in utility to do it with.

D

[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:

Yep, SATA for this purpose is overkill.  USB 2.0 should be fine (35 MB/sec).

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

[WhereEaglesDare]

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

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.

[mlalena]

As for the drive manufacturer "he said, she said" issue, even the best manufacturers have crappy drives. I trust newegg.com reviews more than most. I love WD Caviar Blacks, but when their larger 1TB + Greens first came out they were crap.

As for the heat issue, you can get USB enclosures with fans. The ones with the big fans on top spin slow enough that they make no noise. You can find these for ~ $20. I always get enclosures with fans just to be safe, but then again they are 1TB+ 7200RPM drives in USB/ESATA enclosures. I once tried using one of those thermaltake docking stations to copy a huge drive and nearly burned myself on the drive when the copy was done.

And yes, always keep backups.

[WhereEaglesDare]

And yes, always keep backups.

+1

[mvsfan]

As for the drive manufacturer "he said, she said" issue, even the best manufacturers have crappy drives. I trust newegg.com reviews more than most. I love WD Caviar Blacks, but when their larger 1TB + Greens first came out they were crap.

As for the heat issue, you can get USB enclosures with fans. The ones with the big fans on top spin slow enough that they make no noise. You can find these for ~ $20. I always get enclosures with fans just to be safe, but then again they are 1TB+ 7200RPM drives in USB/ESATA enclosures. I once tried using one of those thermaltake docking stations to copy a huge drive and nearly burned myself on the drive when the copy was done.

Speaking of this, one of the best things you can do is get a big, say, 4.5 big 120V variable speed fan, and a proper finger grille to go on top of it for your cabinet. then mount it as high as possible on the back of the cabinet. The reason for that is simple. Hot air rises, and you want it out of your cabinet. The reason for going with a variable speed 120v fan is cause its operation is basically like an average, cheap 3 foot square box fan bought at Wal Mart or target.

It will move the most air the quickest, and will make more and more noise the faster you spin it.

Basically, with a variable, 120v fan, you need to turn on your arcade system with the sound set as loud as you really want it to be, play a few games, etc and adjust that fan to figure out the comfortable point where that 120v,  4 inch fan starts to make itself known.

truthfully, when you are doing maintenance to your mame system and its quiet, who really cares how loud the fan is. The basic principle is that you dont want your sound to get drowned out when you start The Simpsons, insert game here.





And yes, always keep backups.

[TeutonicDarkness]

 I second that on Seagate drives being bad!
I remember 2 going out in a week. I have Several Maxtors over 10 years old
and still working 100%. Ever Seagate I have ever owned have been noisy junk.
They all eventually failed.

 I 'm kind of neutral on Western Digital. I have had a few that have worked
quite well but some were  noisy. If I had to choose though I would take
a WD over Seagate any day! I have just had way too many die.
Never had one last longer than a year or 2.
Having ten drives go out over a 1 year period isn't good is it?

 Well I guess opinions are like.....

[drventure]

+1 on the western digital. Those and Samsung's I've had the best luck with.

Seagate and maxtor by far the worst luck for me, but ymmv

[eclipso]

I always love reading how we have all had diffrent experiences with diffrent companies equipment. I personally have had nothing but issues with WD and Maxtor (pre-Seagate) drives and have never had any problems with any of my Seagates; although when I went out and bought my TB drives I was a little hesitant knowing that Maxtor and them had merged but I still bought them and have had no issues with these drives either.

[bpark42]

I always love reading how we have all had diffrent experiences with diffrent companies equipment. I personally have had nothing but issues with WD and Maxtor (pre-Seagate) drives and have never had any problems with any of my Seagates; although when I went out and bought my TB drives I was a little hesitant knowing that Maxtor and them had merged but I still bought them and have had no issues with these drives either.

More evidence that pretty much none of the consumer drives out there can be considered reliable.

As for your Seagate TB drives, I strongly recommend you check the firmware versions on them.  As I said previously, there was a widespread issue with Seagate drives not too long ago, and it was mostly with their 1TB and 1.5TB drives.  If the drives are on any of the affected firmware versions, you have the problem.  The fact that you haven't had any issues yet means nothing.  Basically the drives are ticking time bombs.  One day you will power up and the drive will get stuck in a busy state.  The symptoms are: the drive will spin continuously (you can generally hear it), the hard drive activity light will go on and stay on, and the BIOS (and the OS, obviously) will fail to detect the drive.

[eclipso]

More evidence that pretty much none of the consumer drives out there can be considered reliable.

As for your Seagate TB drives, I strongly recommend you check the firmware versions on them.  As I said previously, there was a widespread issue with Seagate drives not too long ago, and it was mostly with their 1TB and 1.5TB drives.  If the drives are on any of the affected firmware versions, you have the problem.  The fact that you haven't had any issues yet means nothing.  Basically the drives are ticking time bombs.  One day you will power up and the drive will get stuck in a busy state.  The symptoms are: the drive will spin continuously (you can generally hear it), the hard drive activity light will go on and stay on, and the BIOS (and the OS, obviously) will fail to detect the drive.

Your absolutly correct, consumer products in this day and age just are not made like they were say 15 years ago. I actually did read about the firmware issue when I was looking into the TB drives and I am in the "clear" as far as that goes.

[Haze]

More evidence that pretty much none of the consumer drives out there can be considered reliable.

As for your Seagate TB drives, I strongly recommend you check the firmware versions on them.  As I said previously, there was a widespread issue with Seagate drives not too long ago, and it was mostly with their 1TB and 1.5TB drives.  If the drives are on any of the affected firmware versions, you have the problem.  The fact that you haven't had any issues yet means nothing.  Basically the drives are ticking time bombs.  One day you will power up and the drive will get stuck in a busy state.  The symptoms are: the drive will spin continuously (you can generally hear it), the hard drive activity light will go on and stay on, and the BIOS (and the OS, obviously) will fail to detect the drive.

Your absolutly correct, consumer products in this day and age just are not made like they were say 15 years ago. I actually did read about the firmware issue when I was looking into the TB drives and I am in the "clear" as far as that goes.

Yeah my drives were clear as well, they're still ticking timebombs, they run very, very hot even with cooling good enough to keep any other drives i've had running cool.  I'd avoid their current range at all costs simply due to that.