Hard Drive Speeds; What works best for quick loading and unloading of games?

[pavlovtiger]

I recently picked up a 4TB external drive as this hobby is requiring more and more roomy accommodations in the Gigs Motel and I want to stretch my legs into the CD based systems (and a little DVD-based, but we won't go into that. ^.^) The drive is only 5900 RPM and currently running on USB 2.0, though I do have the option to switch to my single 3.0 port with some cable shuffling. I previously had my Hyperspin setup on a 2TB USB 2.0 external which is 5900 RPM as well, and as far as launching games (and also queuing for Hyperlaunch to close once I exit a game,) it was slow-ish but workable. This new drive though..things are just slower overall. Games take several extra seconds to launch, and Hyperlaunch takes extra seconds to close upon exit. It's not a deal breaker, but when I'm testing several hundred games to make sure they work, it obviously adds considerable time.

So I know for the future, should I expect any better results from a 7200 RPM external drive? USB 3.0, mind you..there's really no reason I should still be using the 2.0 port if I have the faster option. What about solid state drives, would they give even faster results? I think the absolute slowest I generally see things load is Turbografx-CD.. those can take upwards of a solid minute to load in some cases. Saturn and Playstation aren't as bad, though I don't think I have my Saturn ISOs in 7z format yet. Loading from just plain ISO is obviously quicker. I do note, however, that I did not see improvement on Turbo-CD/PC Engine CD loading when I tested those on my laptop's internal OS drive, which is 7200 RPM SATA. I have not tested any other systems this way, however.

Thanks for reading/replying, just looking to learn a few things.

Cheers.

[dark13]

Are you using zipped iso? Aside from drive speed (can't you simply use a sata internal drive?) if you have zipped iso you have to wait for your cpu to unzip them. This is slow-ish. Using last winrar and rar5 will improve decompressiong speed.

Anyway... if speed is what you really want simply do not zip your ISOs and use an internal 7200 sata hard drive. If you ran out of sata ports you can buy a pci-e (or pci) sata controller (moreover internal HDs are cheaper) . Some emulators need iso to be mounted on a virtual cd drive (magic engine, ootake if games are not "installed", SSf, etc) this can take some seconds.

[pavlovtiger]

In any cases where I do have zipped archives (Turbo/PC Engine CD, PS1, possibly Saturn) I go with 7z archives in the interest of saving a bit of space-per-ISO. Is a WinRAR zip archive faster than 7z? My CPU is a quad-core i7 mobile processor at 2.3 ghz with a turbo function to 3.1 which doesn't kick on unless I manually lift the limiter which I like to avoid where I can.

[dark13]

Yes, winrar 5 is faster, especially while unpackaging rar5. There's a long discussion here http://www.hyperspin-fe.com/forum/showthread.php?25170-WinRar-5-vs-7zip-Fasten-your-seatbelts!

Turbografx 16 cd romset is a pain... all isos I've seen are data+redbook audio (wave), if only ootake or magic engine would support iso+mp3 just like kega fusion...

[lovemaker72]

I take the middle ground. Games that are my "favorites" I keep unzipped. The rest, I only do so when playing them.

[pavlovtiger]

I must be missing something, my attempts to run the RAR5 archives in PS1 and Turbo-CD both bring up SevenZipSharp error windows and the games won't load. I did add rar in the file formats in Hyperlaunch, so I'm not sure if I'm missing a dll specific to RAR5...maybe that's why I can make them but not open them with Hyperspin.

[lovemaker72]

I don't think rar5 is support currently. You would need to custom script the un-raring.