Question regarding extra SSD vs HDD for rom storage for my arcade cab project

[killbill]

Hi Guys,

I just purchased a computer for my arcade cab project (i8700k, GTX2070). It came with 2 smaller SSD drives (750gb all together). I will be putting W10 and all the emulators on one of the drives, and some of the more demanding Teknoparrot games and such on the other drive, but they are all not going to fit. Plus MAME, Atomiswaye, Naomi, Model 2&3, etc. Planning on running all arcade ems and roms. My question is, I will definitely need more space. For game/rom storage does it really matter whether I buy a large HDD drive or another SSD? Not sure if the extra speed is really necessary for this.

Any help or advice is truly appreciated.
Thanks.

[Zebidee]

SSDs are good value, capacity vs cost, at around the 1TB size. That would probably be sufficient for most of your storage needs I imagine. If you need something much bigger then look at HDD, but people don't buy them so much these days for new PC builds.

When doing new build, I use new SSDs (often smaller sizes, maybe 120GB) for operating systems to take advantage of faster access times. Then I recycle old HDDs (whatever I still have lying around) for the game data, as they will be written to only rarely and slower access times will have little overall effect as the data is mostly only read once at the start, as the game is loaded.

That, and if the HDD full of gamedata dies, it can be easily replaced from backups.

[RandyT]

Most vintage game assets are absolutely tiny compared to modern-multi-10s-of-gigabytes games, where SSDs become an absolute necessity.

But there is an advantage other than speed to an SSD if you have things set up well.  If treated as mostly read-only storage once things are where you need them, they could end up being a lot more reliable than a mechanical drive over time.

[killbill]

Thanks for the advice. Went with another SSD drive.