Considering and SSD - Solid State Drive, configuration questions.

[Santoro]

I want to get a 64 GB SSD drive fore my new cab for reliability, cool operation, and silence.  I usually only play the old MAME games, but if in the future I wanted to run CHD games, I was wondering if it would be possible to run those from a wireless network share while keeping the MAME ones local.  Has anyone tried this?  I would probably only run them every so often so I'd be OK with 10-20 second load times.

Can MAME be configured to look for CHD's in different location than /ROMS?

[SavannahLion]

One option is if you have a front end, invoke the -rompath. eg

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mame altbeast -rompath C:\junk\games\mame\roms
You can specify multiple paths to search if you use the semicolon on the command line.

Second option is you can edit the mame.ini file and append the rom search path with semicolons as well. eg

Code: [Select]

rompath      roms;C:\junk\games\mame\roms
I've found, however, that the behavior is a little flakey when appending paths in the mame.ini file like that. It seems MAME will find the game that you specify, but fail to find any supporting files if the game requires them. For example, I can run the game just fine with the first example, but mame will fail if I go with the second example I gave.

The third option is to let your front end carry the burden of directing which directory to use. I haven't tested front ends much so I can't tell you how it's done.

[taz-nz]

I was wondering if it would be possible to run those from a wireless network share while keeping the MAME ones local. 

MAME requires Laser Disc CHDs to be stored locally on a drive with preformance equal or better to that of modern 7200rpm Hard Drive.

[Santoro]

Thanks guys.  I said wireless, but if I had to I could probably arrange a gigabit wired connection.  Now I am off to google whether gigabit compares to a 7200 RPM drive.  I am pretty sure it doesn't...

[Endaar]

The local HDD will be faster, not to mention less of a hassle. Given the cost of (magnetic) disk space, why drive yourself nuts?

[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!)