Just bought one of these...

[johnodon]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178435

Local stores (Target, Best Buy, etc.) have them for the same price.

I finally have a truly portable HS install. I only care about MAME (360GB with CHdS) so 2TB is probably overkill but at least it leaves me room for expansion if I ever decide to do it.

So far I am loving this little drive!

[OneBadVeggie]

I've got 35 systems set up on mine, and it's still got 800 something gigs free, so yeah, maybe a lil overkill if you're just doing mame. lol

[eezetee]

That's exactly what I do. My external HD is a portable 2TB disk. Might not be the fastest compares to a WD Black or an SSD, but the portability and form factor make it perfect for any enclosure. That being said, I could have gotten by with 1 TB disk

Ohh, and given a few threads i've seen about people having HD crashes, it also makes copying data off and/or cloning very easy.

Side question. I've got a large selection of MAME games but only around 24GB. What kind of stuff do you have taking up 360GB?

[marxkemp]

0.154 split + 0.154 CHD's is about 410gb

[LSDguy]

Marx maybe you can teach me something man.

What are chds? Why do they exist? What did you mean by split? I only have zipped roms. Thanks brother.

[marxkemp]

Difference between merged and split

There's no difference in content. There are the same number of games.

The difference is that for the fully merged set, each game will have all of the ROMs (parent ROMs for the 'main' game, clone ROMs for all the various revisions/regions, and common ROM files that all of them rely on) in one archive (.zip or .7z) instead of several different archives.

In a fully split set, you'd have the ROMs required for the main Street Fighter Alpha 3 in one archive (sfa3.7z), but then you would also have several different .7z archives containing all of the ROMs required for the other versions of that game (sfa3b, sfa3h, sfa3u, sfa3ud, sfa3ur1, etc.).

CHD Files

CHD Files-Over time, arcade games evolved from simple one screen games, such as "Pac-Man" or "Galaga," to games that utilized scrolling screens, many playable characters and impressive, cutting-edge graphics. Hard drives were used in a few arcade games to help store the large amounts of data needed to run the game. A CHD file is the compressed image of that hard drive; this single file holds the information of a game's entire hard drive, and is required to play the game through MAME.

• CHDs sets are not T7zip nor zip compressed.
  
• CHD = Compressed Hunks of Data
  
• The chdman tool compresses the hunks of data.
  

Zipping CHDs doesn't make any sense as they're already compressed by definition.

[LSDguy]

Thank you brother! Very clear! I must be missing some of the cutting edge graphics games from mame! Thanks man!

[volumetric]

Thank you brother! Very clear! I must be missing some of the cutting edge graphics games from mame! Thanks man!

Unfortunately not really. Many CHDs are for newer games (as they are compressed hard drives or disc images which older machines dont have). Due to mame not using 3d hardware acceleration, many of the newer titles are not going to run at playable frame rates.

[eezetee]

Oddly enough, with the games list that I downloaded from HyperSpin and the editing that I did (ripped out about 80% of the list due to that I didn't recognize the game) i only had 2-3 games that required a CHD.

Wonder what games I could be missing out on

[THK]

I actually started out with HS on an external drive to drag along to the living room in my university house. Couple of psx controllers, a big ass tv and a fridge full of beer