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Considering and SSD - Solid State Drive, configuration questions.
Santoro:
I have had a lot of hard drives go bad and I can't stand the whine of disks... I am not definitely going with SSD - just evaluating my options at this point.
Endaar:
Sorry if I wasn't clear. I actually like the idea of a SSD for the boot drive and the majority of MAME stuff. It's just that with the sheer size of the MAME CHDs, you may not have a better option than a HDD for them.
VicBond007:
The issue with running CHDs over a network isn't load times. CHDs aren't loaded to memory at all, they're accessed on demand. a CHD is just an image of a hard disk, kinda like a fancy zip file. To put it in comparison, look at all of the stuff in your c:/program files/ directory. All of that isn't loaded when windows starts up. It's accessed on demand. That's what a CHD is. Data on demand.
Networks, wireless or wired, no matter how good their sustained bandwidth is, will have bad latency, especially when seeking to a specific part of the file. Open up a network share and browse through a bunch of directories as best you can, then do the same on a local disk. The difference will always be noticeable. Now MAME is doing these seeks hundreds if not thousands of times per minute. I think you can see where the problem starts to develop.
64GB is fine even for CHDs. There aren't many CHD games that work yet, and even fewer with perfect emulation. Pull out all of the ROM clones that you don't need, and take out the CHDs that won't play anything anyways, and you'll still have plenty of space left over. By the time those games work fine, you'll need a new SSD anyways.
I used to run 5x 10,000 rpm drives in a RAID5 on my work machine and still could never hear them over my extremely low case fans. Sounds to me like you're either working with cheap drives, or are hearing case vibrations, not the drives themselves.
NOP:
I'm currently working on SSDs for my day job (I won't mention who I work for), but I can tell you that you should wait a bit (maybe a year, possibly 2) for SSDs to come up to full speed and for prices to drop. Some of the speeds we're going to be seeing in the next year will make your jaw drop, but right now they'll deflate your wallet faster than the transfer rate of the drive itself.
They are absolutely going to be the next big thing, but we need to get all the players out into the market to drive the innovation up and the price down first. (oh, and to get the bugs out. these things are complicated pieces of hardware!)