Multiple hard drives

[IG-88]

Maybe this should be in the software forum but I'll try here first. I have quite a few old hard drives in the 1-7GB range that I would like to use for Mame. What I wanted to know is can a person "split" the mame software up across 2-3 drives? For example using 3, 2gig HD's for all the needed software. ie: 1 drive for the O/S, 1 drive for the Mame exe, and 1 drive for roms and art work ect. Can a person make multiple partitions across different HD's and have Mame and the O/S work with all of them or is that even possible? Can you even put more than 1 HD in a computer? Does the mobo have to be RAID capable to do that? I assume you can at least put 2 HD's in a system with one set as a master and one as a slave. What about a 3rd or even 4th one?

[brained]

I assume you can at least put 2 HD's in a system with one set as a master and one as a slave. What about a 3rd or even 4th one?

You can put up to 4 IDE drives in your computer, but remember that most internal CDroms, DVD, CDRW, are IDE so your sacrificing those ports.

I think you can configure the frontend to handle different locations of roms, mame has no problems with that, but I haven't tried that out. Try tweaking with the settings of the FE to find out.

[John]

First thing first, yes you can put more than 1 hard drive in your computer assuming you don't already have a Cdrom on the same IDE chain.

Most modern systems have 2 IDE channels which allows you to have 4 IDE devices total (any combinations of IDE harddrives or IDE optical drives)

You can also add more IDE channels by getting IDE controller cards which will give you the ability to add more harddrives to your box.

As to splitting MAME directories, I believe (at least in MAME32 you can insert multiple directories for roms and artworks or whatever you want.  So MAME can look under multiple directories (in your case drive letters and paths) for roms and artworks.  

In your mame.ini it'd look like this.

rompath                 roms;d:\yourpath;e:\yourpath

where each additional path you want is separated by a ;

John

[IG-88]

I assume you can at least put 2 HD's in a system with one set as a master and one as a slave. What about a 3rd or even 4th one?

You can put up to 4 IDE drives in your computer, but remember that most internal CDroms, DVD, CDRW, are IDE so your sacrificing those ports.

I think you can configure the frontend to handle different locations of roms, mame has no problems with that, but I haven't tried that out. Try tweaking with the settings of the FE to find out.

Ya, thats right. I just started working with Kymaera which I love. I think it could do that. And as for the other internal drives once I get all the software installed (via pen drive and USB external drives) I would only need them for repairs or upgrades...

[IG-88]

You can also add more IDE channels by getting IDE controller cards which will give you the ability to add more harddrives to your box.

John

I didn't know about those controller cards. Thats encouraging. Thanks peoples!

[Donger]

RAID is possible, but I wouldn't bother with it.  Your performance benefits would be minimal, especially with a MAME dedicated machine.  Based upon the questions you asked, you're probably not at the level where we can get technical with the answers.

Your first idea is good....set up one drive for the OS, one drive for program files, one for games, etc.

[SirPoonga]

Yes, you can have multiple ROM directories.  In your mame.ini file just list the rom folders seperated by a comma or is it a semicolon.  One of hte two.

Now, finding a frontend that does muliple rom directories is the trick.  I know Dragon King does.  I am not sure about the others.

[krick]

Why not attack the problem from the other direction?

Instead of trying to get mame to work across multiple hard drives,
you could make your system see multiple drives as one big drive.

Promise Technology makes PCI RAID cards that have a special mode called "JBOD".

This stands for "Just a Bunch Of Drives".

Essentially, you can connect up to 4 drives (of any size) and it will make them appear to be one giant drive to the operating system.  None of your software will know the difference because it's all handled at the hardware level.

Of course, you are still ultimately constrained by the limitations of the operating system that you are using.  For example, you cannot create a drive larger than 120GB (roughly).

I know the JBOD feature existed in their cards at least as far back as the FastTrack 66 card that I have.

Search eBay for "promise fasttrak".
You should be able to pick up a used JBOD capable card for under $20.
Here's one currently at $8:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5104269328

I'd connect one drive as normal to your primary IDE port and use this as your "boot" drive.  It doesn't have to be a really large drive.  Just large enough to hold your operating system, swap file, and some basic applications.

Then connect the rest to the FastTrak card and set them up as a JBOD drive for all your data (emulators and roms).

[IG-88]

Cool! I'll get one of those cards and try it out. That means I could go with 5 HD's and a cd-rom if I wanted right? How are the jumpers set on those other cards? I suppose it's in the manual. Now all I have to worry about is one of them failing I guess and maybe keeping all that cool.
Thanks!

[Tiger-Heli]

Now, finding a frontend that does muliple rom directories is the trick.  I know Dragon King does.  I am not sure about the others.

Emuloader does also.  I would expect that even if your frontend doesn't have an option for multiple rom folders, you could specify them manually in your mame.ini file and it would work, but I'm not sure of this.

[IG-88]

I really like Kymaera. I'm sure it does that.....right PacManFan?

[photorock]

        Hey IG-88 I normally don't post here alot, but I saw your post and was reading the responses and I thought to myself using that Raid card is a nightmare just waiting to happen. Maybe it's only me, there's no fault tolerence (raid 5) with that card or atleast I didn't read it anywhere. So if one drive fails... your back to square one. All info accross the striped set will be lost.
         I would suggest to you to find a 20GB drive somewhere and use that to hold your Mame files and one of your other drives to host the OS. Put your Swap file on the same drive as Mame.
         It may be better to spent the $30 or $40 to save the headache down the road, especially in a cab (lots of abuse) 5HD's - 5 chances of failure.
          It's just a thought!

[IG-88]

So one drive failure would wipe out everything else in the other drives? Why is that? It's just that I got all these stupid old HD's sitting around....I spose I could just ebay 'em.  

[brained]

       Hey IG-88 I normally don't post here alot, but I saw your post and was reading the responses and I thought to myself using that Raid card is a nightmare just waiting to happen. Maybe it's only me, there's no fault tolerence (raid 5) with that card or atleast I didn't read it anywhere. So if one drive fails... your back to square one. All info accross the striped set will be lost.
         I would suggest to you to find a 20GB drive somewhere and use that to hold your Mame files and one of your other drives to host the OS. Put your Swap file on the same drive as Mame.
         It may be better to spent the $30 or $40 to save the headache down the road, especially in a cab (lots of abuse) 5HD's - 5 chances of failure.
          It's just a thought!

I think he's telling big INFO here!!. Better get a bigger drive...

[Tiger-Heli]

So one drive failure would wipe out everything else in the other drives? Why is that? It's just that I got all these stupid old HD's sitting around....I spose I could just ebay 'em.  

Only if you use a raid array, (or possibly Krick's JBOD idea, not sure, hadn't heard of that before).

[photorock]

        When you write to a striped set the data is written across all drives, in other words data (file) is written to blocks on different drives depending on file size. A large file could have parts on all HD's. This is with Raid 0, now Raid 5 does the same thing but adds a parity bit for fault tolerence (recovery). In other words if one drive fails you will have to reload all files to those HD's.
        I'm no expert by any means, I just want you to be aware of the limitations of using that Raid card.
        There are a lot of Computer Guru's here who may be able to explain it better. I hope this helps.

[Tiger-Heli]

Just snooped on www.pricewatch.com - Assuming you're in the US, you can get an IDE controller card for about $15.  I don't think you HAVE to set the additional drives up as RAID.  This would allow you to use all your drives and the CD-ROM.

OTOH, a 20.0 GB drive is only $33 with shipping, and might be a more sensible option.

[krick]

With a standard motherboard + a FastTrak card, you can actually have 8 IDE devices (hard drives and/or CD-ROMs) connected...

Motherboard: 2 IDE channels x 2 drives per channel = 4 drives
IDE card: 2 IDE channels x 2 drives per channel = 4 drives

Here's a good review of the FastTrak66...
http://www.2cpu.com/articles/64_1.html

RAID Level 1 (Mirroring)
This is a "security" setting. Mirroring does exactly what it says. It mirrors all information on the primary hard drive to a secondary hard drive. This is completely transparent and automatic. All data is always written to both drives. In the case of a drive failure, the bad drive can be replaced by the "back-up" drive with no loss of data.

RAID Level 0 (Striping)
This is a "performance" setting. You can use 2-4 drives in this array on two channels. All drives are treated as one big, single hard drive. All data is split between the two IDE channels (i.e. All even bits are written to the drives on IDE 1, and all odd bits are written to the drives on IDE 2), which allows the CPU to access information from two channels simultaneously, theoretically doubling transfer speeds.

RAID Level 0+1 (Striping/Mirroring)
This setting allows for the increased performance of level 0 while maintaining the security of level 1. You will need 4 identical drives for this type of array. All data will be striped between the primary drives on channels one and two, while being mirrored to the secondary drives on channels one and two as well (confused yet?). In the odd chance that you lose two drives at the same time, you can swap both drives for new ones without losing any data (unless both drives are on the same channel).

JBOD (Spanning)
Spanning is not a "real" RAID array, but since it is supported by the FastTrak, I will cover it. All that spanning does is combine the total capacity of all the drives (up to four) in your system. This is unique in the fact that all drives will be treated by the computer as one large drive. No more C, D, E, and F drives... Just a C.

JBOD doesn't stripe the data.  It's not really a type of RAID.  There is no performance increase.  From what I've read, if one drive fails in a JBOD setup, you can still get the data off the other individual drives.