Should I compress my roms (zip/rar/7z) Or upgrade my HDD?

[SkyHighGam3r]

Hey guys,

Been a while since I've made a post. I've been busy with a lot.

I picked this back up again, and have been setting up my game library on an external HDD.

Well... I'm almost done, but I'm coming really close to my 1TB limit on my external drive. All I have on that drive are games, so I'm looking to save space, hopefully without deleting anything lol.

Currently none of my games are compressed in zip/rar/7z files. They are all completely unpacked ISO/BIN-CUE/CDI files.

I might go the route of upgrading to a 2TB drive, but I thought I'd see if compression would be a worthwhile option.

What do you guys think?

[Spawk]

All depends on what systems you are going to run and if you are doing fullsets. Not even considering the (Eur) releases included in the databases, just the US sets, both PS1 and Saturn are over 450GB each, Gamecube is over 650GB... etc. I am currently working on PS2 and just the US set is going to be over 2tb... all of these are compressed sizes!!

 

You can never have too much space!

[32assassin]

 I think the choice was made for you by your 1T HD.

 

some emulators load compressed files,  so their is no need to have them uncompressed.

 

PS2 -->  your ISOs should be in compressed with the Gzip format.  PCSX2 will load them directly

Dreamcast --> your CDI files should be replaced with GDI files  Once you have GDI files; you should run the  CHD compression bat file.

NullDC (with the CHD plugin)  will  load a CHD file  directly no need to 7z the file.

[Tomkun]

Rocket Launcher also supports decompressing archives before loading for emulators that don't support running from archives. This can potentially save you a lot of space, too. I use it on basically all systems that don't already support some form of compression. I.E ScummVM, CD32 etc...

 

Too add to what 32assassin says above, Dolphin also supports compression of its isos for Gamecube and Wii games. Gamecubes can be decompressed identically to the originals, so go ahead if you have GameCube games. Wii games have junk data stripped so it's technically lossy, but none of the game data is touched. Some people don't like that, but it's up to you. The potential saved space makes it worth it imho.

[kylecp1979]

 I think the choice was made for you by your 1T HD.

 

some emulators load compressed files,  so their is no need to have them uncompressed.

 

PS2 -->  your ISOs should be in compressed with the Gzip format.  PCSX2 will load them directly

Dreamcast --> your CDI files should be replaced with GDI files  Once you have GDI files; you should run the  CHD compression bat file.

NullDC (with the CHD plugin)  will  load a CHD file  directly no need to 7z the file.

Do you happen to know what file format to use with wii? All mine are in wbfs and zipped .zip. They take forever to load I was wondering if there was a better format.

[Tomkun]

I use isos compressed by Dolphin to gcz. I don't use WBFS, but from what I understand the compression should be equal or at least very similar.

[kylecp1979]

Here is a guide if anyone is still interested

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/3g933n/guide_reduce_the_size_of_your_ps2_gc_wii_x360_ds/

[gigapig]

For Wii I use .ciso but wbfs is pretty much the same (as Tomkun mentioned) and wbfs works with a modded Wii if you have one. You can choose either option in WiiBackup Manager.

There is no point compressing them again into a zip or rar as the size will be the same.

[Tribe Fan]

I had my GameCube and psx games compressed to 7z on a network drive and I felt the extraction time to be prohibitively lengthy. I ended up extracting all the games manually. They're taking up about twice as much space, but I feel it's worth it.

This was on a usb 3.0 network drive accessed through cat 6 Ethernet, so I don't know if the drive being remote had much to do with the slow extraction time or not. Also, I was told in the rlauncher forums that compressing to rar5 offers faster extraction times.

[SkyHighGam3r]

Well here are the supported systems of my setups and their sizes unpacked. It's not completely done yet, mind you. I'd say I have 75% of the games I intend to put here.

152Gb are free out of 931Gb on the drive. So it's pretty full up, which is why I'm starting to consider compression.

PS2 - 484Gb
PSX - 70Gb
Wii - 47Gb
GC - 36Gb
PSP - 33Gb

Sega CD - 26Gb

DC - 23Gb
Sega Saturn - 25Gb
NEC CD - 12Gb
3DO - 7Gb

I don't use full sets of roms, but they are a hand-picked collection from the libraries of a lot of the older systems I have. I like to keep not just old nostalgic ones, but it's great to have games that are iconic to a system as well, or little gems only emulators can do such as romhacks, or fan translations.

The only Cartridge based format worth mentioning would be the DS. It's only at 2Gb but I haven't finished setting that up yet. I estimate it's size will be a lot larger by the end of it.

Seeing how PS2 is going to end up taking at least half of the hard drive, it seemed like there might be a way to save some space there.

I'm a little familiar with Wii as far as iso, and .wbfs, all but one of 2 of mine are in iso. I read in another forum that some people like to use .gcz as it's well supported by Dolphin, and saves plenty of space.

I'm familiar with RocketLauncher, I have it hooked up through hyperspin, and sometimes just use it to launch games by itself. I've seen some settings for using 7z when I setup Daemon Tools.

I'd never heard of using Rar5 if I do go about compressing them, so that's good to know.

[Styphelus]

I compress all my roms in rar 5. Saves me over 1TB in space and decompresses really quickly. I have a 4TB drive and it's completely full so yes, get a new hard drive.

[THK]

I compress all my roms in rar 5. Saves me over 1TB in space. I have a 4TB drive and it's completely full so yes, get a new hard drive.

 

And a backup one

[Tribe Fan]

I compress all my roms in rar 5. Saves me over 1TB in space and decompresses really quickly. I have a 4TB drive and it's completely full so yes, get a new hard drive.

Do you have a GameCube wheel? I'm just curious how fast they decompress for you. It was taking over 90 seconds for me most of the time, which I feel is just a bit too long.

It really could be because I'm using a network drive though. Maybe I should think about connecting it locally and recompressing.

[gigapig]

 I've been following this and thought I'd do some tests.

 

I decided to RAR5 my SNES set and it ended up about 20-30MB bigger than 7z, not much to worry about.

 

Next test was Gamecube. I extracted Ant Bully which is 1.227GB compressed with 7z and takes around 1 minute to extract. Compressing it with RAR5 drops the size to 1.224GB using the best settings.

The amazing thing was the extraction time which was 6 seconds. WTF, still can't believe it.

[SkyHighGam3r]

I compress all my roms in rar 5. Saves me over 1TB in space and decompresses really quickly. I have a 4TB drive and it's completely full so yes, get a new hard drive.

Sounds like compression with rar5 might be the way to go. I'd like to avoid buying another HDD unless I need one. You say you've filled 4TB??? That's incredible. Especially if they are as compressed as you say.

I don't think I'll have anywhere near as much as you so, depending on how compression goes,  I may not need to upgrade to my HDD to a 2Tb. As I said I have almost everything I need, so It shouldn't change too much. 

Hopefully this doesn't prove too complex. I've got a lot of games lol

[SkyHighGam3r]

 I've been following this and thought I'd do some tests.

 

I decided to RAR5 my SNES set and it ended up about 20-30MB bigger than 7z, not much to worry about.

 

Next test was Gamecube. I extracted Ant Bully which is 1.227GB compressed with 7z and takes around 1 minute to extract. Compressing it with RAR5 drops the size to 1.224GB using the best settings.

The amazing thing was the extraction time which was 6 seconds. WTF, still can't believe it.

It's good to know that the extraction time doesn't add a long load. What size is that game uncompressed, just the standard 4.7Gb DVD size? If this compresses that much, it may well be worth it with the amount of games I have.

[gigapig]

It's good to know that the extraction time doesn't add a long load. What size is that game uncompressed, just the standard 4.7Gb DVD size? If this compresses that much, it may well be worth it with the amount of games I have.

It's 1.425GB extracted.

[SIMPLYAUSTIN]

GameCube is an awesome system, soo many classics on that one. The entire collection is a must  

[SkyHighGam3r]

So what is this rar5? I've never used compression before lol and I'm not seeing it i 7zip.

[Fursphere]

Just to throw another idea out there...   what I did for the GameCube and Wii games is setup a script to un-compress the game when it is played (if its not already un-compressed), and re-tag the current date-time on the uncompressed file to a temp folder. 

 

Then, everytime that game is played there after, the script first checks to see if the game has already been uncompressed in the temp folder, and restamps the file with the current date time after its played but before the cleanup routine.  At the very end of the script there is a cleanup routine that deletes all files in the temp folder that are older than 45 days (adjustable, I just choose that to get started).   

 

So games that get played often don't have to deal with constant decompression.  Ones that are played once, then never again eventually go back to being in an archive only state to save space.  

[SkyHighGam3r]

Whoa, that sounds pretty advanced lol.

I'm still just trying to figure out how to make an rar5 file using 7zip.

That's a cool idea though, maybe something I can implement when things are further along.

[Styphelus]

I have a script that will convert 7zip to rar5. It was posted over at the RocketLuncher site a few months ago. Let me know if you are interested.

[gigapig]

I have a script that will convert 7zip to rar5. It was posted over at the RocketLuncher site a few months ago. Let me know if you are interested.

 

Yes please. You can add it to the thread if you like or link to the original post.

[badboo]

I am thinking to do this, I think I may have around 0.8 to 1 tb of ps2 isos ( don't remember exactly), what's the best option to convert this massive amount of gigabits to compress to zip files, Gzip or this rar5 mentioned on this thread?

I have a 5tb hdd so maybe memory space is not critical yet, so i am looking for a faster method of compression.

 

Although I have never heard of this rar5 before.

[SkyHighGam3r]

I'm pretty sure only WinRar can compress a rar5 (I may be wrong). 7zip can only decompress/extract it I believe.

That would be why hahaha. I'll have to download WinRar then.

Hopefully I can compress this all to fit on my 1TB, I'd hate to spend MORE money on a 2TB, though it would be cool to have a separate TB just for Movies/Music.