orac31 Posted August 27, 2015 Author Share Posted August 27, 2015 Hi I don't know if anyone if anyone can answer a few questions. I love retro gameing and collecting systems etc but I just don't have the room to have them all out and set up(and some of my rpgs cost an arm and a leg) and launch box is perfect for my needs. but with ps2 games being up to 4gig each I can see collection getting very big. I have had hard drives go in the past and I don't want to lose the data. so I am toying with the idea of buying a nas drive say 8gig and think you can work in mirror mode. so I would have 4gigs of storage with a back up. 1 would launch box and most emus work of a nas drive 2 would I have to start from scratch as launch box would be looking for my roms in F:\launchbox\games? I could back up to an external hd but the moment I added a new game I would have to do it again hope someone can help Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted August 27, 2015 Share Posted August 27, 2015 Hi @orac31, your best option is something like Crashplan. I gave up on RAID a long time ago because it's simply not reliable for backups. If a hard drive dies, fine, but what if the RAID controller dies? What if the RAID controller's software is faulty and fails to recover after a drive dies? I've lost data because of both scenarios. RAID sucks for backups, so I would advise against going with a NAS solution. RAID is the technology they use to prevent data loss. Crashplan is basically an online backup service. Assuming you don't have metered Internet or anything, there's no better solution. Backs up everything to the cloud, gradually over time. I've backed up over 12 TB (yes, that's 12 terabytes) to Crashplan and I've had to restore hundreds of gigs over the years due to failed drives. Never had an issue, saves me every time. Restores do take a while, but in an emergency they can ship you a hard drive with your data for $$$. Of course it's not free, but they have an unlimited storage amount per computer. You pay per computer, basically. It's worth every penny. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted August 27, 2015 Share Posted August 27, 2015 There are programs that can make mirror images of a hard drive as well. Say you have a 4TB internal, and a 4TB external. You plug in the external and let the process go overnight. When its done safety unplug the external and leave there. If you need to add something small you can either do it manually or have the program do it again. I know what you mean by the size. I have a big PS2 library. It's several hundred GB's. As far as running it over a network. I would not suggest running PS2 games over a network. N64, maybe even PS1 and older would be fine. Maybe even up to DS. After PS2 / Gamecube onwards... they start to get big. Your computer still loads that information as needed by the Emulator in to ram. Load times can increase, the emulators can become unresponsive, etc. Hell, I would say disc based games in general I wouldn't run over a network, but it's really something you should test out. It is more than easy to set it up, you have LaunchBox installed on the computer you'll be using, you then import games and instead of the computer you have LB running on you point it towards your network. In Windows case, it'll more than likely be a Homegroup. My girlfriend and I do this with Kodi and Plex for video. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted August 28, 2015 Share Posted August 28, 2015 All of my PS2 and GameCube games are stored on my Windows Home server and I can't really recall having any issues playing them on my main machine. I have a few HTPC;s that aren't as great spec wise and I won't even attempt to play anything past PS1 on most of them. My core i5 3330 in my kitchen some times struggles with GameCube games I'll have to experiment with adding a game to one of its local drives and see if I get any performance increases. The thing that sucks about it is that it is a Dell with a slim case so it only has two SATA slots and not enough room or power to hook up a dedicated graphics card so I'm stuck with the onboard graphics. Being slim cased though makes it great for tucking away in the corner under where I have my 32 inch sony mounted up above it. I originally was setting emulators in LaunchBox from my network drive and then using the same emulator on different computers but then I noticed that every time I played one I had to change the config for the controllers so I have taken to downloading a fresh emulator on the local machine and just copying ROMs over from the network drive which is setting me up with multiple redundancies for my ROMs which can never be a bad thing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted August 28, 2015 Share Posted August 28, 2015 Do you have a decent speed Router / Modem, and do you have a lot of PC's / devices connected to your network? I assumed the bottleneck would be more of the Network less of the computer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted August 28, 2015 Share Posted August 28, 2015 I have everything cat6 with Gigabit running wired to almost every room with wireless every where and some powerline thrown in for good measure (Its good to have a basement and a father who is an electrician). Have a lot of PC's/devices but mostly mine and my brothers phone are online with some usage, he watches Plex in the basement on a HTPC or on his tablet. My Windows Home Server which is always on and serves Plex out to 6 remote users plus 2 home users but very rarely more than 3 or 4 users at a time. I guess that would mean that the issues I see with GameCube are most likely graphical and making the file local won't really matter at all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted August 28, 2015 Share Posted August 28, 2015 Actually, if your network is under a constant drain then it can. Once something is loaded, its loaded true. However, if your Router and Modem are already servicing a lot of connections then it can affect speeds for anything. We have a modem and two routers. 4 PC's, 4 tablets, 2 phones, a laptop sometimes, and anywhere from 2 or 3 to 5 consoles. I service video to Christina's (my girlfriends) PC every so often. My mother in-law does it from her PC to her PS3, she does Netflix, Hulu etc. Sometimes I'll service video to my Wii U, etc etc etc. So we are using the network a lot. We don't have AC dual band routers or anything but we can get by. Every so often her wifi devices will take a sec to render but I hardly ever get it, I am wired. Optimized content for streaming or network can be different than a full game to an emulator. It is just one thing to keep in mind. The more steps anyone adds to their setup is another step that needs troubleshooting if a problem persists. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted August 28, 2015 Share Posted August 28, 2015 A good test you can make. Set up a homegroup and try to copy a 1GB file from one PC to another over the network and watch the speeds. It's not a direct 1 to 1 for streaming games etc but you can start getting an idea. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted August 28, 2015 Share Posted August 28, 2015 I have a domain controller and all the PC's are clients so no homegrouping permitted (I'm sure I can enable it somewhere but never had the need) the computers are all networked together and I can sign into all of them with the same user name and password. I've seen it write files between my Windows Home Server and my Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials machine at over 100MB so it is pretty quick although when it writes to the externals it isn't as fast as when its from one system disk to another. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted August 28, 2015 Share Posted August 28, 2015 Maybe its the homegroup that has the limitation then. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wraslor Posted September 2, 2015 Share Posted September 2, 2015 Using mapped network drive on my systems to my server, all games including ps2 seem to work fine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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