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Multiple hard drives
Donger:
RAID is possible, but I wouldn't bother with it. Your performance benefits would be minimal, especially with a MAME dedicated machine. Based upon the questions you asked, you're probably not at the level where we can get technical with the answers.
Your first idea is good....set up one drive for the OS, one drive for program files, one for games, etc.
SirPoonga:
Yes, you can have multiple ROM directories. In your mame.ini file just list the rom folders seperated by a comma or is it a semicolon. One of hte two.
Now, finding a frontend that does muliple rom directories is the trick. I know Dragon King does. I am not sure about the others.
krick:
Why not attack the problem from the other direction?
Instead of trying to get mame to work across multiple hard drives,
you could make your system see multiple drives as one big drive.
Promise Technology makes PCI RAID cards that have a special mode called "JBOD".
This stands for "Just a Bunch Of Drives".
Essentially, you can connect up to 4 drives (of any size) and it will make them appear to be one giant drive to the operating system. None of your software will know the difference because it's all handled at the hardware level.
Of course, you are still ultimately constrained by the limitations of the operating system that you are using. For example, you cannot create a drive larger than 120GB (roughly).
I know the JBOD feature existed in their cards at least as far back as the FastTrack 66 card that I have.
Search eBay for "promise fasttrak".
You should be able to pick up a used JBOD capable card for under $20.
Here's one currently at $8:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5104269328
I'd connect one drive as normal to your primary IDE port and use this as your "boot" drive. It doesn't have to be a really large drive. Just large enough to hold your operating system, swap file, and some basic applications.
Then connect the rest to the FastTrak card and set them up as a JBOD drive for all your data (emulators and roms).
IG-88:
Cool! I'll get one of those cards and try it out. That means I could go with 5 HD's and a cd-rom if I wanted right? How are the jumpers set on those other cards? I suppose it's in the manual. Now all I have to worry about is one of them failing I guess and maybe keeping all that cool.
Thanks!
Tiger-Heli:
--- Quote from: SirPoonga on June 24, 2004, 11:27:56 pm ---Now, finding a frontend that does muliple rom directories is the trick. I know Dragon King does. I am not sure about the others.
--- End quote ---
Emuloader does also. I would expect that even if your frontend doesn't have an option for multiple rom folders, you could specify them manually in your mame.ini file and it would work, but I'm not sure of this.
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