new hard drive

[muell67]

Im finally going to get another hard drive for my computer its a amd 2500 w/ a gig of ram. My current hard drive is a 36g wd raptor. Im thinking of buying another so I can put them in a raid 0 striped configuration. Ive heard this will speed them up even more. I just wanted some feed back on if anyone else is doing this and if your happy with it. I would really rather have a larger drive but if there is a signifigant speed increase I will go with the raid setup.

[Kremmit]

Raid 0 is a little faster if you run apps that access the HD a lot, won't do much for MAME.

Raid 0 is also twice as likely to fail as a single drive, so make sure you have a really good backup system in place, or don't store any important data on that computer.

[Trimoor]

I tried raid 0 and it sucks.  It's just as slow, sometimes slower, and I lost two drives worth of data from it.

[Wyluli]

Go buy yourself a nice 120 Gig hard drive.  They are nice!  The 120 Gigs are only a little more in cost than the 80 gigs (at least here in the local stores they were).  Good luck!

[Paul Olson]

Keep checking store flyers for harddrive deals.  You can get them really cheap if you are patient.  I got a 300GB Seagate for $177 - $70 rebate just after christmas.  Space is more important than ever, .92 split set is 40.9GB!

[Samstag]

Go for the RAID 0 and you won't be sorry.  I've got a couple of slow Seagate SATAs in a RAID 0 and they scream compared to a single-drive setup.  As someone else mentioned, it's probably a waste in a MAME-only setup, but when it comes to moving a lot of data around, running two of those Raptors is going to give you phenomenol transfer rates.

One of these days I want to pick up a couple of those Raptors to replace my slow 80 gig drives.

[whammoed]

How does running raid0 affect boot times?  Does it speed it up at all?  Also what about the actual loading of the rom when a large game in mame is started...would that portion be faster?

[Samstag]

Boot times are noticeably faster, and loading a large rom would be faster.  I don't think I'd spend the money on a RAID 0 system just for those features, though.  I move a lot of large files around on a regular basis so I get a lot of benefit out of it.  On a MAME machine you're probably not going to be spending a lot of time waiting for it to boot or load roms compared to the amount of time you'll be playing a game (where disk speed becomes meaningless).

[whammoed]

Gotcha...sometimes I contemplate a mame system where money is no object.

Me:  "yea, I run a raid0 with sata raptors for faster boots and rom loads"

Guest:  "Whatever there geek boy, let's play some Donkey Kong."

[krick]

RAID0 can be VERY fast when done correctly.

The problem is that hard drives made today totally suck and are not reliable at all.

[krick]

Go buy yourself a nice 120 Gig hard drive.

[elvis]

I tried raid 0 and it sucks.  It's just as slow, sometimes slower, and I lost two drives worth of data from it.

No offense, but if RAID0 is slower for you than a single drive, then you've stuffed something up.  Simple as that.

Take it from someone who builds corporate level fibre-channel RAID arrays, NASs and SANs for a living.

Oh and while I'm here, and RAID for MAME really is pointless.  Load times are a couple of seconds at worst.  It's not like you're loading multi-terabyte files or anything that actually needs the speed of RAID.  Spend your money on something else more worthwhile.

[Matt Berry]

Hey Krik what brand HD were you buying to have such a high failure rate?Ide or SATA and were they being cooled with fans?

As for the faster harddrive you might be better of just buying the 72Gb raptor and adding it to your system. It is much faster then the smaller 36gb drive.

[krick]

Doesn't seem to matter which brand really.

I've had a western digital special edition drive fail,
a Seagate, an IBM, and a laptop drive, I can't remember if that was a Fujitsu or Hitachi.

[BobA]

You probably have already noticed the reduced warranty on many drives lately.  Probably a sure sign of what is happening to quality in the race to get the most Gbytes per buck. 

Now the question is do corporate drives (meaning $) have the same failure rate?  Or do you get quality when you spend more?

I went the cheap way.   My main mame setup resides on my 80 Gig D drive and I boot from a 40 Gig C drive.   For backup I have a 200 Gig USB drive that I can move to any system easily.  It is a bit slower but only used for archive and video files.

BobA

[Paul Olson]

I just haven't seen the reliability problems everyone is talking about.  I currently have a 45GB IBM, 60GB WD, 160GB Seagate, 200GB WD, 250GB WD, 250GB Maxtor, and a 300GB Seagate.  They have all been stable.  The only drives I've heard of that were consistantly bad were the IBM 75GB.

Paul

[elvis]

You probably have already noticed the reduced warranty on many drives lately.  Probably a sure sign of what is happening to quality in the race to get the most Gbytes per buck. 

That is changing.  There are at least 2 manufacturers who are going back to 3-year warranties this year.  Others will follow suit after that when customers jump ship.

[krick]

Problem is that the length of the warranty doesn't matter if I lose important data.  The warranty just gets me a new drive.

[Dexter]

Also what about the actual loading of the rom when a large game in mame is started...would that portion be faster?

If you're running dosmame, theres a way of speeding up loading times of roms on SOME systems. Download a dos utility called smartdrive and add the following line to your autoexec.bat file (back it up first just in case!)

smartdrv 8192

Make sure you place it after any 'SET' lines i.e. SET BLASTER

It made a huge difference on my cabs

[elvis]

Problem is that the length of the warranty doesn't matter if I lose important data.  The warranty just gets me a new drive.

Drives are no more or less volatile than they where 15 years ago.  Any hardware with moving parts is always subject to a percentage failure rate.  I don't know where this misconception that drives where better quality in the past comes from.  I'm guessing it was because back in the old days there where far fewer folks who had home PCs, and therefor less reports of busted hard drives.  That, and with the proliferation of the interenet, now every idiot with a home PC has a public forum to vent their anger whenever their hardware breaks.  Economy if scale, I guess.

Back up your important data regularly.  If that much is too difficult, then invest in RAID1 mirrors.  Harddrives never where perfect, and never will be perfect.  That much is just a plain fact of the IT industry.

I don't know how many times I've said "I told you so" to folks who have lost all of their data even AFTER I've told them to back up.  I've got an old 1GHz machine at home with a big RAID1 mirror on it, and everyone in my house uses it as a dumping ground for important information.  Even then I recommend that the REALLY important stuff gets backed up to DVD-R and lives offsite somewhere.  After all, RAID mirrors won't save you from a house fire.

I guess it all boils down to how much you care about your data.  If it really means that much to you, then you'll put in the effort to ensure it is safe.

[mnm1200]

I tried raid 0 and it sucks.  It's just as slow, sometimes slower, and I lost two drives worth of data from it.

In RAID 0, you NEED a good alternative backup solution (I like RAID 0+1).
If RAID 0 was slower for you, it was probably because of poor BIOS support or if you hooked both drives on the same cable for some reason. PATA devices can only talk one at a time per channel so they'll spend a lot of time waiting if connected to the same cable...