External Hdd Recomendations?

[Yourname942]

I plan on eventually having all systems and games up to/including Xbox, PS2, and GC generation of games. My question is: what Hdd brand/capacity would you recommend? (also how can you chain them together?) Thank you.

[JoyStickKilla]

Why would you have Xbox?

I just go with the seagates

[Skeeveo]

Good luck getting all the games, it'll be quite the challenge without....... ya know. Seagate is generally the most bang for your buck. In reality, you'll probably only want around 5tb, unless you REALLY want to clog up your system with crappy shovelware games. For anything sixth generation up, it's best to just pick and choose, you'll save a huge amount of space and actually have games you'll play / your friends will want to play. I find 5TB is loads more then I actually use despite having a massive amount of games. 

 

If you really want everything, you'll need around 8-10TB, not including PC/DOS games.

[THK]

4TB is about the sweet spot price wise atm. Seagates are indeed good bang for the buck and I personally never had problems with them. They had some bad 3TB drives, but so did WD for instance. Though I would not recommend the 8+TB seagates atm due to the way they work & in-depth reviews I'be read. Also 8+TB is quite expensive for what you get.

 

Personally I've always bought cheap(ish) external cases for my older 3.5" drives when I replaced them with higher capacity models in my desktop and used them for backup or gave them away to family for said purpose. Only ever bought one external hdd and it actually broke sooner than an the older drives I put in a cheap case xD

 

If you really need more than 4-6 TB external, I'd just clone/build two HS systems, one with consoles & arcade and one with computer based systems for instance.

[gigapig]

Did I read that most of the Xbox titles were on either the PS2 or Gamecube anyway.

I've on put Gamecube on my cab build and don't plan to add any other disc systems , maybe some PSONE. So the Roms I put on the WD 3tb Red drive are just over 2tb, do room left for my Steam games.

[progets]

Just my 2 cents but nobody has mentioned RPM, eSATA or USB 3.0. I prefer 7,200 RPM drives vs. 5,400 RPM drives for performance. Once you get into large drives you will see that most aren't 7,200 RPM. The way you connect the drive will also be a factor. I like eSATA but USB 3.0 isn't too bad, anything less will be slow. Some of the newer drives that are very large are sold as "Archive" drives and will be undesirable due to the way they operate. I have a couple of Toshiba 5 GB drives that are 7,200 RPM and cost less than $120 each on sale. They work well but are a little noisy. 5 GB is a good size drive and should hold all you need. At this size you will find there aren't many 7,200 drives at a decent price.

 

In a nut shell...

- buy a 7,200 RPM drive at least 4 GB in size

- buy an enclosure that has a fast bus (eSATA or USB 3.0)

- don't buy a drive labeled as an "Archive" drive

- don't buy a 2.5" large drive unless size means more to you than performance

[THK]

Don't forget that same rpm may differ in throughput speed, so it isn't everything, but in general you're right. I've some or at least 5900 (not 5400 weirdly) rpm drives that beat a couple of 7200rpm ones.

 

You're right on archive drives, one of the reason I adviced not to go for 8+ drives. In any case, I always suggest to pick a few drives that cover what you need (the points you brought up) and then try to read/scan a couple of reviews on each option.

[progets]

@THK - I like Seagate drives but I think their largest 7,200 RPM drive is 3 GB. 90% of the drives I own are Seagate but nothing larger than 3 GB is Seagate.

[THK]

@THK - I like Seagate drives but I think their largest 7,200 RPM drive is 3 GB. 90% of the drives I own are Seagate but nothing larger than 3 GB is Seagate.

 

I run my OS(es) (dual boot win10 LTSB & win7, but I find myself not using 7 at all anymore, so about time for a fresh install of a non-LTSB version win10) and demanding apps/games from a 1TB 850EVO SSD, the rest is mostly storage and games where I see no benefit in loading it from my SSD.

 

I have 2 Seagate 4 TB hdds (good $/GB, no need for high speed) and then 5 other drives ranging from 3 to 1.5TB. As I keep upgrading drives when needed and take em with me to new builds.

I donated my previous 250GB 840EVO OS drive to my brother to speed up his crummy ol' laptop a bit to the point it's actually usable again xD

[Dabil]

Samsung is releasing a 2 TB SSD drive here in October. I think I remember reading the price will be around $450. Within a couple years Samsung predicts SSD prices will be even with HDD prices.

I added an SSD to my game machine a while back as the Windows drive, I will never again use anything else. Performance boost is incredible.

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk

[THK]

Yup, best upgrade to any non-ssd system without turning it inside out or starting from scratch.

[JoyStickKilla]

I have like 8 of the 5tb Seagate drives, a few removed from the case and put in my pc case and the rest external( a few of the drives are stictly backup). Never had any issues with any of them, 5400 rpm drives are more than enough for this, hell even if you plug it into a USB 2 port they work just fine speedwise for playing games..

[trebukenz]

I have watched plenty of youtube videos and read plenty of threads.  I think in a perfect world I would put Hyperspin on an SSD with the media.  I think it makes it much smoother.  Games can then be stored anywhere if you have a modern PC.  HD speed and size is whatever you can afford.  There are at least a couple of individuals 30+ terabytes...it depends how much of a completionist you are.  I think I recently saw a Dreamcast download that was nearly 500GB, and PS1 can run much larger espeacially with imports.  PS2, Wii, Xbox, Cemu, Gamecube...way too much space unless you pick and choose your games...

[Yourname942]

1) Should Hyperspin and emulators be stored on an SSD, and just store the games on an HDD?  I don't care about the cost, since this is a long term project anyway. Yeah I plan on being a ridiculous completionist (somewhat) so I will need a LOT of space (more than 12tb at least)

 

My goal is to have artwork and media for all of my games/systems on Hyperspin (Up to/ including the 6th gen consoles (Xbox/PS2/GC)).

 

2) Is there a way to chain HDD's and partition/make your PC think that they are 1 drive location? (instead of separate locations/data) Are there Pros/Cons to this? If this is not possible, then lets say for example "Console A's" roms are stored on 2 different HDD locations. (half are on HDD1 and the other half are on HDD2) Would it even matter that they're on 2 different drives? Thank you.

[wesfranks]

On the new overkill system I completed, I have two 240gb SSD drives striped Raid 0 as a system drive. The speed of SSD drives is in the read cycle which makes them ideal as boot/system drives with system and program files already installed, so minimal need to change or rewrite those types of files. SSD drives are actually slower in the write cycle than regular hard drives, especially with multi-disc and read/write heads as the current standard. That is one of the reasons I went with Raid 0 SSDs. Splits the write cycle between two drives/drive ports so this should theoretically speed up both the read and write cycles. Not worried about redundancy since I have hard copies and clones of all OS and programs. All system/ user folders changed to a separate drive so data writes are maintained there.

I also have a 1tb SSD drive for larger Steam games. Am still debating what portion of my HyperSpin install I am going to put on there.

For data drives (roms) I have 3- 6tb drives. Waiting to decide whether to go Raid 5 with those drives. Not worried about redundancy with roms since this will make my third copy. Really just depends on if I want the extra performance or need the extra drive space for newer dumps of disc based roms and multi-regional updates.

Samsung Evo SSDs and HGST NAS drives. Nothing over 6tb due to higher failure rate with larger drives.

[wesfranks]

I am curious how ya'll deal with your "temp" folder for let's say unzipping and loading roms. This is usually what causes the most delay for larger roms during the loading cycle and has plenty of complaints.

The default location for unzipping is typically in the users folder on the system drive. However, if your zipped roms are on another drive, it has to be copied to the temp folder, then unzipped, then loaded in the emulator.

If the default temp folder is also on an SSD drive, then wouldn't this cause even greater delay due to the slower write cycle for SSD drives?

On my older system I moved my zip utility temp folder to the drive with my largest zipped roms to bypass copying the file first.

Just curious how everyone else does it?

[THK]

What's been said above is about it I believe. If you're not using an external hdd but a pc/htpc, then:

 

Hyperspin + media (images/themes/vids) >> SSD (especially for smoother wheel & theme loading)

Roms >> HDD (even slower hdd's would do)

PC/steam games >> SSD or HDD depending on the game and how your loading times are

Emu's I don't really know, but I presume HDD would do just fine, on SSD wouldn't be a bad thing

[progets]

The original topic was HS on an external HD. I assumed that the goal was for one external drive to run everything. If that's the case a large 7,200 RPM drive attached eSATA is the way to go.

 

If money and number of drives isn't a concern then RAID 10 across 1 TB or 2 TB SSD drives would be ideal. This will cost a fortune and require a lot of physical space and power.

 

In a more realistic setup a 500 GB or 1 TB SSD for the OS/HS/RL/Emulators/Media and one or more 5 TB 7,200 RPM drives for rom storage with a lot of RAM is the way to go. You will want to dedicate 4 - 8 GB of RAM to a RAM drive and use that location to extract/unzip you roms which will speed things up a lot on newer systems that have large compressed files.

 

Other thoughts...

- RAID can be great if done right but most consumer RAID setups are crap (commercial RAID setups are expensive but are much better)

- You can use 5x the storage and not compress newer systems (I think this is just a waste of space and money)

- If you need more than 10 TB of storage you're just wasting space (you will never play all of these games)

- Store games you play often uncompressed and leave the rest compressed

- You can combine physical drives to look like a single drive in Windows which might seem great but don't do it! (a failure of one drive will lose all data on all drives)

- Focus on what you will play the most and make those roms run fast (who cares about games you play once a month or year)

 

Bottom line is different strokes for different folks. You can spend a little or a lot on your setup. I would personally rather spend money on building a cabinet and life like experience than on storage for 10s of thousands of games I will never play (and aren't even practical to play on real arcade controls (like most of the computer game emulation)). I guess it depends on who you are but everyone's ideal setup will be different.

[THK]

Maybe it's nice to know why exactly you opt for an external drive

[THK]

2) Is there a way to chain HDD's and partition/make your PC think that they are 1 drive location? (instead of separate locations/data) Are there Pros/Cons to this? If this is not possible, then lets say for example "Console A's" roms are stored on 2 different HDD locations. (half are on HDD1 and the other half are on HDD2) Would it even matter that they're on 2 different drives? Thank you.

 

No need. For each individual system you can point to different hard drive locations for emulator & roms. Same goes for the preview vids, so as long as HS, RL and their media are on the same drive you're good.

[progets]

@wesfranks - Temp folder should be a RAM Disk if you have enough RAM. It's the only way to go. http://www.rlauncher.com/wiki/index.php?title=HowTo_Utilize_RAMDisk

 

FYI - If you don'r use a RAM Disk reading and writing to the same drive will be much longer than reading from one drive and writing to another drive.

[thatman84]

So this thread popped up and I have been contemplating what drive setup to go for. The big difference is I'm only using android shield TV.

What do you guys think I should do (cost vs performance) I'm not going for complete roms for disc systems or MAME chd's with android limits but I will probably go for a decent selection of GC and ps1. Plus I will have a PC setup as I go for future use.

4Tb sounds the way to go so assume that.

Options

1. external usb drive

2. Usb Desktop enclosure

3. NAS drive

[wesfranks]

@wesfranks - Temp folder should be a RAM Disk if you have enough RAM. It's the only way to go. http://www.rlauncher.com/wiki/index.php?title=HowTo_Utilize_RAMDisk

FYI - If you don'r use a RAM Disk reading and writing to the same drive will be much longer than reading from one drive and writing to another drive.

Yes progets, this is what I was planning on my new system. Got too much ram on purpose. Have you tried it? I remember discussing ramdrives before.

I know boot time is crazy fast on Raid 0, but boot time occurs so infrequently, am looking more for program loading gains.

Thanks also THK for your response. That will help my planning.

[THK]

Thanks also THK for your response. That will help my planning.

 

No problem. I highly recommend looking up a RocketLauncher tutorial on their forum. HS can be pointed towards emu/roms/vid locations through HyperHQ or system config files (which HyperHQ edits, though not every option is in the UI)

With  RocketLauncher you can set up emulators etc different for games to optimize for individual games, use different emus on one wheel, etc.

 

On my recommendations above, loading from slower hdd's will probably be more of a pain with large files/iso's if they are compressed. Though it highly depends on the level, format for compression and how they are uncompressed for loading to play.

[progets]

Yes, I use it on one of my machines (the others don't have enough RAM). If you're using it on PS2 games you really need to dedicate 8 GB of RAM. If you make it too small and try to extract a larger game you'll obviously have issues. It will increase the unzip time a lot and it will even increase the actual performance when playing the game because the entire rom is coming from RAM instead of a hard drive.