External HD for MAME

[Firebat138]

I need to buy a new hard drive and I want to get a TB or 2...  Should I be fine in just purchasing a 1TB Mybook and running everything on that?  Does anyone do this and is there a performance degradation...  Thanx

Firebat

[severdhed]

If you are going to put it on an external hard drive, then i would go with e-sata.  the usb 2.0 interface is just nowhere near as fast, and could cause performance degradation.  or, you could always just go with an internal hard drive.

you can pick up a 1tb drive for under $100 now, internal or external.     

[Firebat138]

The Mybook has Firewire...would that be better..

And E-Sata   My Precision 340....what sata card could I use...can you provide me a link and a link to a hard drive... i always get that stuff confused...  Thanx

[severdhed]

does your PC have e-sata?  does it even have sata II?  what about pci express slots?  i cannot really provide any information without knowing anything about your PC.

[thecheat]

Why not just go internal? You can buy a SATA 1tb hard drive for $80 from Newegg.

I second the eSATA but I think that Firewire will do in a pinch. If you don't have either eSATA or Firewire ports, pick up an enclosure with eSATA and a controller card. If you already have FW, get a FW hard drive enclosure.

[severdhed]

i agree...internal hard drive makes more sense.

[ahofle]

I have a USB external drive and it works just fine with no noticeable performance degradation.  Emulation in general is not very disk intensive at all, so I don't think eSATA is necessary.

[Enforcer407]

I agree about USB being fine.  I've been running all my stuff from an External Notebook Drive (only 5400 RPM) and USB interface.  I've been playing MAME, NES, SNES, etc all the way up to PSX and Dreamcast without any problems.

Just my $.02

[blind_dado]

I too have everything (mame and all emulators) on a 300gb external usb drive an it works fine.  Never noticed a problem.

[Aceldamor]

What about LD games on externals?

I've actually been toying with the idea of running my mame data from my server on a GB network, so my data is centralized.

[blind_dado]

LD games work fine.  Can't speak to idea of having everything on a network though.

[bkenobi]

I ran into someone using a NAS to store his collection a while back.  Even though he had a good network setup, he seemed to be running into problems of network latency.  There may be some tweaks to improve this, so storing your roms on a network drive might be ok.  I wouldn't recommend storing the emulators there though.  Be aware that even a GB network is going to run slower than a USB drive.

[massive88]

Arent non-laser disc Mame roms basically loaded to memory?  I would think the storage site of the roms would not be a big difference as they arent accessed during gameplay.

The emulator itself I would have on a local drive for sure though.

[thecheat]

I ran into someone using a NAS to store his collection a while back.  Even though he had a good network setup, he seemed to be running into problems of network latency.  There may be some tweaks to improve this, so storing your roms on a network drive might be ok.  I wouldn't recommend storing the emulators there though.  Be aware that even a GB network is going to run slower than a USB drive.

I was going to do this but over Wireless-G, it wasn't too laggy in my tests on CHD based games. For simplicity's sake, and a change of hardware, I decided to just store them locally on a 2nd internal drive.

[Chadwick]

All my emulation is on an external mybook also.  I have no noticeable performance problems.

[heemid]

Here is a pretty sweet deal, its USB and eSATA. Use code EMCLSNM47 for an extra 10% off.
 
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?nm_mc=AFC-SlickDeals&cm_mmc=AFC-SlickDeals-_-NA-_-NA-_-NA&Item=N82E16822204069

[mrserv0n]

If you are going to put it on an external hard drive, then i would go with e-sata.  the usb 2.0 interface is just nowhere near as fast, and could cause performance degradation.  or, you could always just go with an internal hard drive.

you can pick up a 1tb drive for under $100 now, internal or external.     

I have run a cabinet off a usb 2.0 ext for a long time and there is no difference in performance. You do not need Esata

[massive88]

I did some tests using Mame and roms on the same HDD, and mame and roms on different HDDs this weekend, I found zero difference in speed.

This was tested on Blitz and Gauntlet Dark Legacy, both hard drives were internal SATA drives though, not an external.