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HDD recommendations
Dervacumen:
--- Quote from: gman314 on September 29, 2012, 10:11:05 am ---I decided on a WD Caviar black 7200 rpm 500 gb 64 mb cache for my primary drive. As for the secondary backup drive, I have 2 in my possession, 1 of which I will return. Which do you think is better: a WD caviar green 5400 rpm 500 gb 32 mb cache or a WD scorpio notebook drive 7200 rpm 500 gb 16 mb cache? I ordered the notebook drive by mistake. What is more important, the rpm speed of the scorpio or the larger cache of the green? Keep in mind that I have a bartop, so neither drive will be mounted inside of a tower.
The third option is that I may just return them both and go with another WD caviar black.
--- End quote ---
I was just going to suggest this. The WD Black has a 5 year warranty and I got so sick of drives failing after 3 years I spent a few extra bucks. It's been my main drive for a few yeas now.
I don't really understand what the fuss is about a hard drive for MAME though. I've never used anything but old salvaged 40-60 GB drives for mine.
RPM speed will outweigh the larger cache unless you plan on transferring a ton of small files frequently.
JoeB:
Wow, lots of hate for SSD in this thread. :)
While its true that if SSD die, they die hard, same is true for modern spinning drives. Modern Sata drives have such high ariel density that they rely on Crc checks to work! Use something like spinrite and you'll see it in action.
SSD drives are smaller and more expensive but they allow mame users to create the illusion of using real pcb drives rather than a PC (almost instant boot and instant game launch) you can also turn off your PC without shutdown and not fear data loss.
In addition, with 4+ gb of ram in a dedicated mame PC why would anyone even have swap enabled in windows???
It's your $$$ do as you please. From a pure technology point of view SSD is here and here to stay. I'll be shocked if anyone will be able to purchase a spinning drive a decade from now.
gman314:
--- Quote from: JoeB on September 29, 2012, 10:44:20 pm ---Wow, lots of hate for SSD in this thread. :)
While its true that if SSD die, they die hard, same is true for modern spinning drives. Modern Sata drives have such high ariel density that they rely on Crc checks to work! Use something like spinrite and you'll see it in action.
SSD drives are smaller and more expensive but they allow mame users to create the illusion of using real pcb drives rather than a PC (almost instant boot and instant game launch) you can also turn off your PC without shutdown and not fear data loss.
In addition, with 4+ gb of ram in a dedicated mame PC why would anyone even have swap enabled in windows???
It's your $$$ do as you please. From a pure technology point of view SSD is here and here to stay. I'll be shocked if anyone will be able to purchase a spinning drive a decade from now.
--- End quote ---
Hmmm...You kind of have me thinking about SSDs now. Is it really "instant" stratup time? I guess up until now I never gave conscious thought to the fact that a typical PC boot time is somewhat "non-arcade like". That always kind of bothered me and I didn't think that they was any way around it. The problem is that those SSDs are so expensive. If I was starting my cab from scratch, I would almost definitely invest in one. Is it possible to find a decent one of about 300gb for under $200?
Dervacumen:
You can get SSD'd for about $1/GB. I think the cheapest I've seen recently was 256GB for about $200. So yes, sort of within your range. As with everything tech if you're not super hot to get it now and you keep your feelers out there will be something on special somewhere, sometime.
gman314:
I just ordered a Samsung 256gb SSD for $200 (the reviews on newegg were great). I will use the WD black 500gb as my backup. Is it really true that you can just shut the pc down at any time without risking losing data? How can that be? Is it because of the lack of moving parts?
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