Advise on arcade cab storage..

[King Homer]

I'm building a cab with gameex. I was able to get a pentium 4 but the motherboard only has 1 SATA connector. The drive connected now is an 80 gig but I just purchased a 1 TB. It will be a bit of a pain to ghost the old drive and place it on the new. Does anyone believe that there would a dramatic drop in performance if I left the 80 gig with windows in the SATA port and placed all my emulators on the 1tb with a sata to USB connector? Probably the biggest PC hogs would be the Playstation, N64 and Mame emulators (also plan on using mame video in my gameex themes.)

[gryhnd]

Cloning from a smaller drive to a larger drive usually isn't an issue.

Otherwise, spend another $20 and just buy a PCI SATA card to expand your options :-)

[King Homer]

Cloning from a smaller drive to a larger drive usually isn't an issue.

Otherwise, spend another $20 and just buy a PCI SATA card to expand your options :-)

I would love that option but..... the "miniature" board that I am using to fit in my bartop cab only has 1 PCI which I am running my wireless internet from.

[jombee]

I would clone the old drive if I was you. Most new drives will have software that makes the cloning very simple. I believe the USB max transfer speed is 480 Mbit/s, while the SATA interface will allow at least 1.5 Gb/s on an older motherboard, and 3 Gb/s on any fairly recent board.

[chriss]

i cloned my cab hdd to a bigger drive without any issues. i just prepared a usb stick with bartpe and used norton ghost! worked like a charme...

i would get rid of the 80gb because two drives at the same time raise the noise level

[Endaar]

Well, you won't like my answer, but I'd use this as an opportunity to reinstall Windows. Partition the 1TB drive with 40GB or so for the OS and the rest for emulators. You should be able to move virtually all your emulation stuff from the old drive to the new just with a straight copy. GameEx requires a reinstall, but most of the emulators don't touch the registry and therefore are easy to relocate.

Option #2 would be to ditch the wireless and hardware the network connection. Wireless is really not ideal for a PC that doesn't move, unless there are no other options.

Endaar

[bkenobi]

I ran a lot of HDD performance tests when I built my file server and compared IDE, SATA, USB, 1394, RAID5, 10mb network, 100mb network, 1000mb network, 54mb network, and probably other configs. I found that IDE and SATA were fairly similar for the packet transfers I was testing. I found that USB and 1394 were close, but surprisingly the USB was faster in general. I found that RAID5 was at least as fast as IDE and SATA. When looking at networked drives, the network was obviously the bottleneck. The different networks performance ranked in the following order (from memory): 54mb, 10mb, 100mb, 1000mb (faster to the right).

I think I still have the files and the info about how I performed the testing. If anyone is interested, I can try to dig up the info.

Anyway, to answer your question about drive performance, I think you will notice a difference in performance between the USB drive and SATA, but it's much better than being networked over wireless. I'm not sure what options you are serious about, but I would think a local USB drive wouldn't be a bad way to go in a pinch. The advantage to that might be that it's easy to pull and connect to a different system for rom updates (rather than using wireless to download the updates...SLOOOOOOOW!)

[chriss]

oh, thats really an advantage to be able to unplug the drive for updates!

good call bkenobi!

[wobbly]

what about esata ?

much faster then usb with the same portability

[bkenobi]

Yup, eSATA would be better than USB spec-wise. Also, I don't think you need to do anything fancy other than use a different connector. BUT, if you have to open the cabinet to hook up the drive anyway, you might as well just use SATA...unless you have eSATA on another system to use for the update. USB is on all systems, so it's definitely available but eSATA is less common.