Using a solid state drive instead of normal hard drive in cab

[atog]

I was on someones cab site the other day and saw they were using some sort of small flash memory drive hooked up to an ide cable and had their OS and MAME on it and skipped a normal hard drive altogether.  Kind of a neat idea but I don't know what that really gets you.

He said he was doing it because it was quieter but really, how noisy is a hard drive?  I think it's much more likely he is doing it because he had the stuff on hand, and it's kind of cool.

Anybody else thought of doing this?  Does it give you any benefit?  It's smaller but is it any faster than a normal hard drive?

[SirPeale]

It's dead silent

It boots much faster

No moving parts

[atog]

the silent and the moving parts don't mean much to me when they are buried inside the cabinet, but booting faster is always a good thing.

I would think a good chunk of your boot time is taken up by the bios itself.  My cab boots to win98 in about 30 seconds from hitting the power switch.  How much time do you think a drive like this would shave off?

[Danny R]

You won't get much storage space with solid state yet.  I think the largest size you can get is 8 gigs, and that runs in the thousands of dollars.

[atog]

I could definitely get by on 512 meg for my cab, since I am only running mame .55.  I don't think the few seconds speed difference would be worth the $$$ though.

[foomench]

I bought a solid state drive for a client HTPC on eBay - 1GB for $80. That might be an option for some people. It wouldn't work for an arcade cabinet for me though - for various reasons I want XP, and I don't think that will fit. Another similar option is a Compact Flash to IDE adapter. CF is getting cheaper and capacities are going up.
-foomench

[Witchboard]

We had a member who was working on a cabinet with this option.  Here's the thread.

[PixelCloud]

There are ram solid state drives which are VERY expensive but super fast..

ithey are basically a circut board with a load of ram sticks in them ...


Edit by moderator: Do not try to get around the auto-censor.  What you have to say involves profanity, it's not worth saying!

[AlanS17]

I've heard that flash memory has only a limited amount a read/write cycles before they go byebye. The only practical way to use them (at least for an indefinite amount of time) would be to make a RAM drive at start-up and then to load the contents of the flash memory into RAM every time you start the computer. They make a version of Win98 that fits on like 100MB, and that seems to be a popular option used in conjunction with flash drives. Otherwise you may wake up one day to an "Incredible Disposable Arcade Machine".

[foomench]

There are a number of options of getting around the read/write cycles thing. You can make your boot partition read-only. The real issue is the swap space which involves lots of reading and writing. I've heard of some people setting that up on a network drive. I think most of these are pretty easy to do with Linux, but may be more difficult with Windows.
-foomench

[Witchboard]

Couldn't you just disable the page file (set size to 0)?

[JoyMonkey]

Even without a page file, there's a lot of read/writes going on with Windows. I've used a CF to IDE adapter and DOS with no problem (you can fit DOS, ArcadeOS and Vantage on a 16mb CF card!). With a DOS setup you don't have to worry about the cards read/write life-span.

The only thing stopping it from booting in a second is the BIOS check. Does anyone know of a particular motherboard that skips by this super fast? The older PC's I've been using seem to like taking their time going through the BIOS checks.

[foomench]

Couldn't you just disable the page file (set size to 0)?

Win2k will complain about this and make a small one (20MB). I suspect XP will do the same. I don't know about Linux.
-foomench

[Witchboard]

I wouldn't think that Win2K would be a good OS for a CF card.    It's just too big.

[PixelCloud]

There are a number of options of getting around the read/write cycles thing. You can make your boot partition read-only. The real issue is the swap space which involves lots of reading and writing. I've heard of some people setting that up on a network drive. I think most of these are pretty easy to do with Linux, but may be more difficult with Windows.
-foomench

fdisk

[SirPoonga]

Did he have a CD drive?  You can easily get away with a bootable mame disk and use a solid state drive to store saves and cfg files.

I have a small HD on my cabinet because I network drive my games.

[foomench]

I wouldn't think that Win2K would be a good OS for a CF card.    It's just too big.

My solid state disk is 1GB. You can get Win2K Pro in that. Here's a link to Microsoft for the KB article 255771 - How to Minimize the Installed "Footprint" of Windows 2000 Professional:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;255771

-foomench