Harddrive too small for roms

[Dupre]

Hey everyone,

So I overspent on my cabinet, and had to toss in a old $40 pc that only has a 20g hd. It has a ethernet card, and I have it connected to my router just fine and can browse the internet and do Gameex updates perfect. But here is my question.....

I have a 1TB external Harddrive that is hooked up to my network on a ethernet cord. Will Gameex be able to read my roms from this location? And if so will there be any excess lag or other undesireable effects from this? Thanks alot anything that knows the answer to this and willing to post.

[Brian Hoffman]

Hey everyone,

So I overspent on my cabinet, and had to toss in a old $40 pc that only has a 20g hd. It has a ethernet card, and I have it connected to my router just fine and can browse the internet and do Gameex updates perfect. But here is my question.....

I have a 1TB external Harddrive that is hooked up to my network on a ethernet cord. Will Gameex be able to read my roms from this location? And if so will there be any excess lag or other undesireable effects from this? Thanks alot anything that knows the answer to this and willing to post.

External Drives are plenty fast. I have a1 tb mybook I use .. I use the USB tho... But a 100mbs shouldbe fine.

Make sure you map the network drive and give it a drive letter.

I think the real question is.. Is your $40 dolla pc fast enough to emulate all your drive can hold?!?

[Dupre]

Heck no! My pc should be being excavated from the ground by a archaeologist because its as old as a dinosaur!

[gerble1000]

Heck no! My pc should be being excavated from the ground by a archaeologist because its as old as a dinosaur!

lol

[Tempest]

Heck no! My pc should be being excavated from the ground by a archaeologist because its as old as a dinosaur!

Don't say that! Before you know it, they'll have your cabinet shut down, with red tape all over the place, and you won't be able to go near your Cab again until the red tape is cleared up! The bad thing is that only conclusion that they would be able to reach is that this specific dinosaur had eaten silicon just before it died! (probably what killed it)

[Adultery]

That and the carpal tunnel!

[Freelancer]

I have an older PC setup to run in my cabinet as well. I originally had an external USB drive hooked up that had all the roms. There was considerable lag from the time that I choose a game to the time it actually launched.

I went to Fry's and purchased a SATA card (about $20) installed it in one of my free PCI slots and then used the external SATA connection for my drive instead of the USB connection. This made a huge difference in performance.

[bkenobi]

I think it could depend on your system specs as much as the hard drive itself. If the rom is located on an external drive and you have low memory (and/or it's a large rom), it could play from the page file. If that's true, then you could be copying the game from the external drive (high lag, but good throughput) to memory (fast, but dependent on bus and drives holding the data) and then to the page file drive (if this is slow, it won't help). In any case, it's not ideal, but a usable option if required.

BTW, I went through an extensive benchmarking effort this spring when setting up my file server in order to get the best possible file transfer speeds I could. I found that when comparing internal PATA, external PATA via USB, external PATA via FireWire, 10BaseT, 100BaseT, 1000BaseT, RAID5 (various combinations of locations and connections), USB and FireWire were practically identical in my setup. The speeds for internal was faster for writes, but for reads things weren't too far off for the external setups.

[Tailslide]

I went to Fry's and purchased a SATA card (about $20) installed it in one of my free PCI slots and then used the external SATA connection for my drive instead of the USB connection. This made a huge difference in performance.

^^ this is the way to go. Same speed as an internal drive. They even have docks you can get for like $40 so you can take a naked SATA drive and just stick it in connector side down, hot swappable.

[midiman]

Sounds to me like you sould just save up and buy a new PC. MAME doesn't require much - built a Shuttle that's doing an excellent job for $350 (+ArcadeVGA\JPAC cost however).