Starting again with a new SSD Drive

[Rincewind]

I need a little help here , I've found the system I'm using is a bit sluggish while using Launchbox so as a fix I'm hoping that an SSD drive will speed it up. The Pc is old tho but I thought as it's only used as a emulator in a cabinet it should be fine , the computer is a Intel Core2 duo 3ghz ,4gb ram , a nvidia 730gt graphics so it's far from a speed machine but plays the games fine upto PlayStation. What I have is C: drive (sata) has windows on it and F: drive (sata) has Launchbox - Emulators - Roms So should I add the new SSD and just put Launchbox on it or should use it as my main drive and put windows on it and Launchbox, I suppose I'm asking do I need to start afresh and redownload everything or not and what is the best route to take in doing this

[DOS76]

I prefer my system on my SSD and LaunchBox on a separate data drive but that will mean you need to reinstall Windows or clone your drive which can be easy or difficult depending on the size of your drives (if your SSD is larger than your original drive that is the easiest) or what software you use to accomplish this.

[SentaiBrad]

Yea I have LaunchBox on an internal Sata 6GB/s connection and it's great with my OS on the SSD. At a certain point an SSD could help, but I am more willing to bet your CPU is the culprit. As long as LB is on an internal SATA 3GB/s or a 6GB/s connection you're going to be doing pretty good. LaunchBox can have a lot of images, but it's all cached. So if you have a giant library it will certainly drag down LaunchBox but based on your CPU. A while ago we figured out that the cut off before performance starts to take a hit was 8k in your LB Library.

[Rincewind]

That's interesting 8 thousand games and I definitely have more than that, also I forgot it's not a sata drive I'm using Launchbox - Emulators and Roms it's a usb portable drive not a sata drive will this effect it

[DOS76]

No if you have the OS on an SSD it will be fine accessing LB from a external USB drive (If the drive is USB 3.0 you will get better performance than USB 2 but I think it would still be fine).

[nathanddrews]

My experience with many front ends (I suppose computing in general) is that you want a triple threat: 1. High clock speed CPU 2. Large quantity of RAM (8GB if using 64-bit 7/8/10) 3. High read-performance storage (most SSDs) I'm not sure if it's irony, but my primary emulation PC is overkill for all my emulation needs (it's even working great for Cemu), can play most PC games very well, but still struggles from time to time with FE. :/

[SentaiBrad]

nathanddrews said My experience with many front ends (I suppose computing in general) is that you want a triple threat: 1. High clock speed CPU 2. Large quantity of RAM (8GB if using 64-bit 7/8/10) 3. High read-performance storage (most SSDs) I'm not sure if it's irony, but my primary emulation PC is overkill for all my emulation needs (it's even working great for Cemu), can play most PC games very well, but still struggles from time to time with FE. :/

High Clock speed is a misnomer though. If you have a CPU that is 10 years old (@Rincewind has a Pro 2 Duo) then it could be any clock speed and it really wont matter. LaunchBox is multi-threaded If I recall, so it can utilize more than 1 core, but the computations your CPU is doing is a lot lower than a newer chip. Assuming this is an older Pro 2 Duo, because they stopped producing this a while ago, a first gen i3 (Dual Core) at even 2.8Ghz or 2.5Ghz would be a better CPU. Again assuming this is an older model. Even if it is a newer CPU, within the last 5-7 years, a generation or two older CPU could still be a gigantic upgrade without breaking the bank. My point being, if you are just wanting to do emulation you can get a low end PC and still be able to be fine. LaunchBox requires more than a user thinks and if you start to have a 10k, 20k, 30k library then performance will start to drastically take a hit. If your External is USB3, it is less of a big deal. However, I also have a feeling it's not so then yea that can effect the performance. A USB2 drive has a low read / write so LaunchBox may be throwing data at it that the drive can't keep up with.

[DOS76]

Yeah if that proved to be the case after testing its performance you could always move LaunchBox to the SSD but keep your emulators or games on your external now this would depend on what the OP is trying to emulate of course I know that on some of my systems I stream the games from network storage and they handle everything up to N64 PS1 without issue (These PC are usually more modestly specced so I don't attempt anything higher end to know whether my network would handle it or not) I suspect due to the PC's specs it probably isn't pushing PCSX2 or Dolphin.

[SentaiBrad]

Yea, against better judgement I threw Fallout 4 on my OS'es SSD and it loads insanely faster. Previously the OS would take up 75% to 100% of my HDD's read / write according to Task Manager. Now I've never seen it get higher than 30% on the SSD, so Fallout 4 has a big playground even compared to an internal drive that I had it on. So while you'll generally hear us say to keep games on a separate drive, I agree with @DOS76 that putting just LaunchBox on the SSD along with your OS may still increase performance even with your OS on the same drive.

[Rincewind]

Thanks for the advice I will try that then , I'll put windows and Launchbox only on the ssd and see if that helps. I will update this thread with the results incase it helps anyone

[Rincewind]

So far I managed to clone my windows to the ssd and that's working great , When moving LaunchBox can I simply drag it over and change the ROM paths or do I need to install it

[SentaiBrad]

LaunchBox is completely portable. If your games are on an external, change the drive letter to what the drive letter was previously and it should match up perfectly if you didn't change anything else. Otherwise you can change the drive path manually in the LaunchBox.xml with Notepad++ and the Fine and Replace All feature. Make a backup first though.