Happy and Tragic Arcade Day

[csnow]

Well the good news is that the freight truck showed up with my Galaga/Ms Pac reunion cabinet.  She is lovely - I have always wanted one of those cabinets.  I know many don't care for the large monitor but I absolutely dig it.   I am going to throw my Arcade SD board it in for some big screen Donkey Kong, Galaxian, Frogger, Dig Dug, and other one button 4-way vertical goodness (don't worry, I am keeping the original jamma too).

The tragedy is that my hard drive crashed upgrading my Golden Tee 2011 to 2015 today.  Installed the memory, video card, and security chip.  It booted to the upgrade via the USB stick, but it kept giving me an insufficient throughput error and would reload.  Called ITS support and they told me to remove the USB drive and let it boot back to 2011.  Made it to the booting from hard drive and then kaput  .  Appears I have bad sectors on the hard drive which caused the failed upgrade.  Hard drive was $175 with the 2015 loaded so all is not lost.  With a new video card, memory, and hard drive this unit should give me plenty of years.  I am not too upset since the computer is a 2007 model.  At the end of the day its a Taiwan made hard drive with 8 years of service on it. 

Oh did I mention I have a Galaga/Ms Pac reunion cab 

[JimmyU]

Could you transfer the HD image to a SSD? It might be more stable in the long run.

[dkersten]

Not to split hairs, but SSD's degrade much faster than HDD platters.. SSD drives have a bunch of extra capacity that is reserved for when cells go bad on the memory so they can get more life out of them.  However, I think you are on the right track, there are a number of drives out there that are designed to last much longer and are usually comparable in price to the higher performing/lower lifespan drives.  Then again, it is a crapshoot, a drive can always fail even if it is rated for 500,000 hours...

[nitrogen_widget]

Not to split hairs, but SSD's degrade much faster than HDD platters.. SSD drives have a bunch of extra capacity that is reserved for when cells go bad on the memory so they can get more life out of them.  However, I think you are on the right track, there are a number of drives out there that are designed to last much longer and are usually comparable in price to the higher performing/lower lifespan drives.  Then again, it is a crapshoot, a drive can always fail even if it is rated for 500,000 hours...

According to this article:
http://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-casualties-on-the-way-to-a-petabyte

most of the SSD's dipped into the reserves at 100 TBs of writes and failed at 700 TB's.

Trying to fathom 100 TB's when the biggest drive I have is 1TB and after 4yrs I still haven't filled it and when I recently replaced it (just in case) I actually ended up deleting stuff I didn't need.

[dkersten]

You could have 10gb stored and reach 100tb of data transfer in a few years if you use it regularly.  It is perfectly reasonable that an average home user will hit 100tb of data transfer on their drive over a 5 year period of time.  This is why those drives have a shorter warranty on average over an HDD.  HDD's can fail, but SSD's are guaranteed to fail at some point.  That being said, neither drive type is particularly unreliable.  My point is that overall, SSD's have a higher chance of failing and losing data than an HDD, so saying that buying one ensures you are safe is incorrect.  It will ensure you don't have a mechanical failure, but does nothing to guarantee you won't have an electrical failure of some kind, so it is, as I said, "splitting hairs".. in the end, the odds are (slightly) in favor of the HDD lasting longer, so that is where I would (and do) put my money when it comes to long term data integrity.

[csnow]

I got my hard drive today and the machine is back online upgraded to 2015.  I am loving the nearly 50 courses loaded on this. 

[SavannahLion]

You could have 10gb stored and reach 100tb of data transfer in a few years if you use it regularly.  It is perfectly reasonable that an average home user will hit 100tb of data transfer on their drive over a 5 year period of time.  This is why those drives have a shorter warranty on average over an HDD.  HDD's can fail, but SSD's are guaranteed to fail at some point.  That being said, neither drive type is particularly unreliable.  My point is that overall, SSD's have a higher chance of failing and losing data than an HDD, so saying that buying one ensures you are safe is incorrect.  It will ensure you don't have a mechanical failure, but does nothing to guarantee you won't have an electrical failure of some kind, so it is, as I said, "splitting hairs".. in the end, the odds are (slightly) in favor of the HDD lasting longer, so that is where I would (and do) put my money when it comes to long term data integrity.

You make it sound like that simply reading the drive will also kill them.

[Xiaou2]

Exactly Savannahlion.

 This whole HDD argument is Mute when your talking about mame / emu machines..  unless you are re-writing your entire rom set often.

 Its far more beneficial to use a SSD in an arcade machine, due to heat and vibrations.

 Anyone who slams their fists on a CP could effectively cause the HDD head to crash into the Disk surface, which is usually spinning at 7,000 rpm.
It wont take long to kill a HDD like that.

 If you cant afford an SSD, then you are going to want to make a vibration free hammock of sorts... using flexible rubber banding... supporting it in the air.
You will also want a decently powerful fan placed right in front of it... blowing across its surface.   If the HDD isnt cooled well, the metal will expand, and due to the tight tolerances, this can cause wear and other issues.

 Typical HDDs are a crapshoot.  You could have one last 10 yrs... or fail in 3 days of purchase.  They stink.   The warranties Stink too.
Funny enough, a lot of peoples HDDs that last the longest... actually have issues.  The thing is... they tend not to move the data around, and or
dont move the data that is in the damaged spots...  so it appears to be fine.

 However, when it comes time to backup the data.. clean up the system...etc... it usually becomes apparent...  that their precious data is lost / corrupted.

[Malenko]

so much partially correct info above.

SSD in a MAME cab would be beneficial for the reduced load times (both OS and ROM) and things of that nature. If I were going to put an SSD in my MAME PC, I'd put the OS and ROMS on it, but I'd still put a regular hard drive in there for the scratch/temp files. For arcade games that used HDs, I'd replace them with compact flash cards.

Slamming your fist on a CP hard enough to jolt a hard drive mounted in the base would require enough force to probably break the control panel, no need to be overly dramatic. Buying a hammock for your hard drive is something I'd consider overkill, silicone ringed screws do plenty to reduce vibration. Hard drives are going to vibrate, all the vibration isolation techniques are more for muting noise in the case than prolonging the longevity of the drives.

While cooling is never a bad idea; HDs have impressively high tolerances for heat. Excluding extreme cases most hard drive failures are caused by wear and tear on the actuator which causes errors and / or  contact between the head and platter. This is also excluding manufacturing  errors as was the case with the IBM Deskstar 75GXP aka the "Deathstars"



If you don't have at least 2 extra copies of your data, its just not that important to you.

[dkersten]

If ya really wanna get technical, unless you have no page files or dump files set up and run 100% on RAM when booting up and running your OS, your OS is constantly writing to the drive.  On an SSD, you can't just modify a few bytes of data when you write, you have to read an entire block, modify it, then write the entire block even if you only want to change a small amount of that block, so even files that never technically change can be rewritten thousands of times over the course of a few years if they don't use 100% of the blocks they are stored on.  With life cycles of only around 1000 rewrites for typical MLC, eventually bits and pieces of a file that share a block with other data could be corrupted over time, even if all you ever did was read those files.  Technically the controller on the SSD will simply use some spare cells to keep this from affecting things, but that doesn't mean it isn't happening and that it doesn't reduce the overall reliability of the drive.

Again though, it is all semantics, overall both types of drive are very reliable on average, I admitted from the start that I was splitting hairs... I use an SSD for my mame cab and I have no doubt that in 5 years the data will still be just fine.

As for an HDD failing because of someone slamming into the CP, that is absurdity at the extreme..  Perhaps if you bolted the HDD directly to the underside of the CP surface...  By the time the shocks from even an abusive player travel from the CP to the frame of the cabinet, to the PC inside that frame, to the drive cage inside that PC, to the drive itself, past the internal damping in the drive, it would take dozens if not hundreds of G's of force applied to the CP to actually affect the HDD in any appreciable way.  HDD's can withstand many G's of acceleration while spinning at full speed without a collision between the head and the platter.  If these things were that sensitive, laptop users would be seeing failed drives by the truckloads.

And not to be a grammar Nazi or anything, ffs, it's MOOT, not MUTE. 

If you don't have at least 2 extra copies of your data, its just not that important to you.

BINGO, the ONLY way to effectively reduce the likelihood of data loss is with redundancy.  You can get a fraction of a percent less likelihood of losing data by sticking to a good quality HDD over an SSD, but you can reduce your chances of losing data by 50% by just making a backup of it.