changing un zip location

[orac31]

Can I ask please I have bought a pc just to run emulators from and I am setting up from an external hard drive. I have found that you can get it to unzip the files if they are zipped and then run them and it puts them in launchbox 7z temp can I change this location to my ssd boot drive? thank you mike

[CADScott]

There is currently no setting to change this but you can work around this by using symbolic links to point the unzip location to your SSD. If you are unfamiliar with symbolic links in windows, they are quite easy to create. Simply open a command prompt with admin rights, and then type the command: mklink /J C:\SSDUnzip Z:\LaunchBox\7-Zip\Temp This creates a directory link that makes windows think the Unzip directory is on your Z drive (External drive letter), but it is really on your SSD in the SSDUnzip directory.

[DOS76]

Personally I wouldn't want to be writing all of those temp files to your SSD over and over again that it just putting wear and tear on the drive and over the long run can shorten the life of the drive.

[SentaiBrad]

DOS76 said Personally I wouldn't want to be writing all of those temp files to your SSD over and over again that it just putting wear and tear on the drive and over the long run can shorten the life of the drive.

Yea I agree, don't do that to your SSD. Honestly, don't archive large games, they'll take forever. We honestly suggest most users just archive games up to the N64 and GBA, maybe even the Nintendo DS. Any disc based system or very large files will just take a long time, dependent on your PC.

[fromlostdays]

If loading time isn't a concern, I bought a little flashdrive and just unzip to there. I'm not sure if that works with symbolic links or not, though. I wouldn't use an SSD for that either. Better to have the front end (Launchbox) on the SSD for faster asset loading.

[CADScott]

I really think that there is a lot of paranoia about write cycling on SSDs that is based on the early SSDs which were very poor and wore out extremely quickly. As long as you have a newish good brand SSD you should never come close to hitting the wear limit on a drive under normal home use. For example, the SSD I have in my PC is a Samsung EVo 850 Pro 250GB, which is warrantied for 10 years and 150TB of writes. This is a MASSIVE amount of data to write. If you calculate it out it is 41GB per day, every day for 10 years! To put that in perspective, it is like installing a new copy of Windows 10 twice every day for the entire 10 years. You will not use that much data in normal use, and this is the warrantied amount. Many endurance tests have shown SSDs going well into the petabytes of data written before failure. The Tech Report did a great test of this, and their testing over 18 months had drives going for twice their rated life before they saw even a single error reported, and only failing above 2PB of written data. I compress my large disk based images because it saves a massive amount of space on my secondary mechanical drive, and the speed difference is negligible when you uncompress to the SSD. Even with the largest disk based games (PS2), you would need to be playing many multiple games per day to ever reach an issue with your SSD. I understand many people are wary, but it is easy to check if you have any problems by checking the SMART values on your SSD. This will tell you exactly how much data you have written to the drive and also the time that it has been in your system, so you can actually see the writes per day. Keep an eye on this over a few weeks of normal use and you will see that the data written is actually well below problem levels. Rant over!

[SentaiBrad]

No that's awesome Scott, I certainly can't know everything all the time, so if someone else has already done that type of research then it is certainly worth sharing. The Samsung Evo 850 has been at the top of my wishlist for SSD's. I already knew to stay away from anything PNY or other cheap manufactures (I've had so many of those PNY thumb drives fail so fast), but specific numbers is good.

[CADScott]

Yep, definitely steer clear of the cheap SSDs, in fact what my research the only brands that give a meaningful warranty that includes total data written are Samsung and Intel. Both of them warranty for approx 40GB a day, all the other drives I have researched only warranty for a time period, and most other brands are only 3 years anyway, where Samsung and Intel are at least 5 years. I have 4 different machines with SSDs in them, and all of them are Samsung brand. They may be a bit more expensive, but they have never skipped a beat and are amazingly fast.

[SentaiBrad]

Have you seen any good data on Sandisk SSD's? They're all I buy in terms of SD Cards and Thumb drives, and SSD's are essentially cracked out versions of SD cards.

[CADScott]

Sandisk have a quite good reputation for their SSDs, and are relatively cheap for their capacity. The problem I have with them is that they only give a 3 year warranty for their standard consumer models. Their Extreme Pro model has a 10 year warranty but they do not give any specific warranty for data endurance, and locally it is pretty much the same price as a Samsung EVO Pro. Sandisk state that if you are writing too much to a drive then it is not classed as consumer use and you should be buying enterprise class drives, so they do not give write endurance levels for consumer drives. But they will not give out data about what level the consider consumer usage cuts off and becomes enterprise! Performance wise they are pretty much the same, so I would go for a Samsung unless there was a very significant price difference to make up for the less comprehensive warranty.

[DOS76]

After having a few bad experiences with PNY I usually buy SanDisk but I do have a Intel drive in one of my servers.and a Samsung mSata drive that connects via PCIe in my slim desktop. SanDisk has always beeen reliable to me at the best price.

[orac31]

thanks all

[weltall]

I really wanted to thank CADScott for pointing out that. I remember I used that years ago, but I did not remember about it. Actually even if I did, I would not think this is possible. Thanks a lot for pointing that out :)