ssd for os and fe and hard drive for roms

[UFO8MyCow]

I am in the process of getting ready to setup my cabinet with a new computer and I was thinking about taking advantage of the speed of solid state drives. I am going o be running tinyxp for the OS to speed up the start up time and i was thinking about using a small solid state drive just for the operating system, emulators, front end  and  a much larger hard drive to hold all the roms. I would love to get a big enough ssd to hold everything but they are still pretty expensive and I have a 320gig hd I am not using. My question is first off is there any reason I couldn't do this and second would the boot time be that much fasterwith the SSD?

[Donkbaca]

Boot times should be faster.  The biggest downside is that SSDs have a limited number of read/write cycles, so they will break down and wear out over time, they don't last as long as traditional hard drives.

Your OS would load a little faster and MAME would load a little faster, though I don't think the games will load any faster if the roms are on a regular drive.

DO you only use this machine for MAME?  If so consider the fact that you would essentially be paying a pretty big premium on hard drive space just to shave a few seconds off your boot time.

[DillonFoulds]

IMO the roms should load a bit faster as well, since the drive won't have to do "random" read/writes between front-end, emulator, and rom. Less back and forth seek time is always a good thing.

That being said, you'll see almost the same performance if you defrag your hard drive, then ghost (capture and image and write it back). Ghosting will also help a bit in the defrag department, but it's also nice to have a backup image of your drive, as well. Doing the defrag/ghost will make almost the same difference as a solid state drive will, in performance, since you'll be negating your drive seek time, and that's not a bad thing at all.

[crzywolf]

Here is something that may be interesting if you want to use ssd. HDDBOOST

[NOP]

Boot times should be faster.  The biggest downside is that SSDs have a limited number of read/write cycles, so they will break down and wear out over time, they don't last as long as traditional hard drives.

to be pedantic, there is no limited number of read/write cycles in an SSD, it's the number of erase cycles you get.  Reads are unlimited.  Before any write can take place, the media has to be erased.   There's a lot of juggling of your data on SSDs (called wear leveling) to move data around so that no section of your drive is erased more than other locations, spreading the erase counts around.  Each block in a flash part might be erased 100,000 times before wearing out.  You'll get thousands of blocks in a drive, multiply that out and you can do billions of erase cycles before the entire drive is worn out.  Estimated life can be easily far more than a spinning media drive; it's estimated to be 10+ years on most drives now.

I'll hand you a huge grain of salt though and say that of course no one really knows how long they're going to last, since they've only been around for a couple years, and it also depends on what you're doing with it.  Lots of tiny writes (like updating a file allocation table) is going to be way more damaging than a drive that is storing lots of movies and never getting re-written...

[UFO8MyCow]

after doing some looking around I thin I am going to go the same basic route but with a compact flash card with a sata adapter that will be recognised as a normal hard drive but much faster. This way if it dosnt work I am only out about $25. Now my question is how big of a card will i need just to run tinyxp, a few emulators and either maximus arcade or hyperspin will a 4gb card be enough or should I jump up to an 8gb or 16gb.

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

Is a cf card really going to be faster than a standard data drive? That doesn't seem right.

[solid12345]

Go with a SSD, it will really blow you away, I am using them now in my workstation rig, they make great scratch disks for video editing

Like NOP said, don't worry about life span, I trust them to last alot more than a traditional HD with rapidly spinning parts, if mechanical
HD's were to be trusted no one would have invented the RAID system.

Where an SSD would really shine in a MAME cab is to put all your screenshots and artwork on them when flipping through a frontend.