Hard drive

[JDarcade]

Is a internal hard drive better than external for Launchbox ?

 

 

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[SentaiBrad]

Not necessarily, it depends. If you have a USB2 drive (or, oh god, a USB1 drive) then yea. Even if LaunchBox doesn't see too much of a difference, the seek times alone would be much better. I have even an internal 5400RPM SATA3 drive and it blows USB1 and 2 out of the water (USB 1 is pretty much non-existent now). If you have a USB3 or even an mSATA drive then it wont be so bad, as long as the drive and cable specs actually meet up to the proper standard. Some "budget" stuff might not come close to the proper speeds. If you are talking about a SATA3 SSD or even an M.2 SSD, then LaunchBox wont really even use the faster speeds. The average seek time will still be much higher, general performance could still increase, but LaunchBox doesn't actively take advantage of the speeds. My 5400RPM 8TB SATA3 drive runs LaunchBox and all my games just fine, with some room to spare. My OS though is on an SSD which helps, which helps the most. I also want an SSD for certain games, like Fallout 4, Skyrim, etc, but those are extreme cases.

[JDarcade]

Not necessarily, it depends. If you have a USB2 drive (or, oh god, a USB1 drive) then yea. Even if LaunchBox doesn't see too much of a difference, the seek times alone would be much better. I have even an internal 5400RPM SATA3 drive and it blows USB1 and 2 out of the water (USB 1 is pretty much non-existent now). If you have a USB3 or even an mSATA drive then it wont be so bad, as long as the drive and cable specs actually meet up to the proper standard. Some "budget" stuff might not come close to the proper speeds. If you are talking about a SATA3 SSD or even an M.2 SSD, then LaunchBox wont really even use the faster speeds. The average seek time will still be much higher, general performance could still increase, but LaunchBox doesn't actively take advantage of the speeds. My 5400RPM 8TB SATA3 drive runs LaunchBox and all my games just fine, with some room to spare. My OS though is on an SSD which helps, which helps the most. I also want an SSD for certain games, like Fallout 4, Skyrim, etc, but those are extreme cases.

This is what my wife got me for my birthday I never did tell her what type just 2TB.


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[SentaiBrad]

Well, that doesn't tell me if it's USB3 or not. If it's USB2 (most likely), then you'll be fine to put games on it, it's not going to matter too too much in that regard. Just be careful with the drive, as it can fail easily by being moved a lot. Seagate drives are also notorious for failure. If it's USB only, and no power adapter, seek times may take longer if you haven't accessed the drive in a while too, as it's being powered only bt the PC and the PC will power it down. You could turn that off or lessen it in the power management though.

[JDarcade]

I couldn't find much for USB so I'm guessing USB2 also. Thanks didn't know that about Seagate. Might return it and get a different one.


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[SentaiBrad]

Yea, I don't want to talk down a present from your wife, I feel bad for doing that, but I'd rather be honest. There are some people here who've had good experiences with Seagate, but every Seagate drive I've ever had failed quickly. I have a 500GB Western Digital drive from 2008 still going strong; though that's honestly a ticking time bomb now and I don't rely on it for anything anymore... but it's still working, and it was an OS drive for 7 years, with tons of re-installs. You can tell if it's USB2 or 3 by the USB A port (the side you stick in to the PC). If it's Blue, it's USB3. If it's any other color (usually White), it's USB2.

[JDarcade]

Yea, I don't want to talk down a present from your wife, I feel bad for doing that, but I'd rather be honest. [emoji23] There are some people here who've had good experiences with Seagate, but every Seagate drive I've ever had failed quickly. I have a 500GB Western Digital drive from 2008 still going strong. You can tell if it's USB2 or 3 by the USB A port (the side you stick in to the PC). If it's Blue, it's USB3. If it's any other color (usually White), it's USB2.

Haha right I'm the same when she gave it to me I was like oh... the drive I'm setting up is a 1TB and it's filling up fast. Ha who know have Mame CHDs would take up so much. But she said return it and get the right one. I guess she picked right drive but than 2nd guessed and did the external.


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[SentaiBrad]

If you can afford it, a Western Digital Black Internal drive are some of the best. The black drives are a bit more expensive, but they're performance oriented and really worth it for gaming. Don't get the Green ones though, they're eco friendly drives and their performance is really poor. The blue drives are the average consumer drives, a bit cheaper than black, and will work totally fine. I have 2 4TB Western Digital Book externals that I use, but mostly for storing media and downloads. I keep all my emulation stuff, including my LB install on an 8TB HGST 5400RPM SATA 3 drive. It's price, at the time, was really good because it was on sale. The second you go that high though, the prices start to get insane. Western Digital and HGST (a branch of WD now actually) are some of the best drives. HGST drives have some of the lowest failure rates. I got that data from a data center actually. It's a company called BackBlaze and I use them to back up my PC to the cloud, their data center. They do bi or quad yearly updates on the failure rates of their drives (I'm almost certain it's quarterly). They do it that often because they have thousands and thousands of drives whos on and write times are astounding, so they get lots of data very fast. What would take us a few years to find out, they can find out in like 6 months sometimes.

[ckp]

i use a couple big Seagate usb 3 drives because they are so cheap in price. I've been running one for two years with no issue and the other for 1 year with no issue.

However, Western Digital is better. For me, these cheap seagate drives seem to be fine for storing emulation stuff, like roms, LB, emulators, media.

What you can also do, and what I did with one of my Seagate usb3 expansion drives, is crack open the case and install the bare drive internally for an internal sata cable connection. It's much better than the usb3 connection. I do keep one drive connected by usb 3 for portability, but if you don't need the portability, just crack it open (youtube videos) and install it internally. That would be my advice. Oddly, it's cheaper to buy the entire external seagate usb 3 drive than to buy a seagate bare drive. 

[SentaiBrad]

1-3 years is when my Seagate drives would fail. Some sizes have known extreme failure rates, while some are not so bad, but I can't take that chance. The externals may be cheaper for a variety of reasons, speeds are generally one of them. Unless you're looking at the same internal drive as the same external drive, external drives can be very different, generally stuck at 5400RPM. Has no bearing on once the drive is loaded in to, but I do notice that my drive sometimes takes a little bit to spin up. I guess it all depends on your budget, but I think spending the extra $10-40 on a Western Digital or HGST drive is much more worth it.

[ckp]

el cheapo seagate 5TB = ~$120, cheapest 5TB western digital or hgst ~$200+

if given he choice, sure, take western digital (i wouldn't even go for HGST if i'm going to pay the premium). but some people already have the seagate as a gift or due to budget. i'm just saying that they can last a fair amount of time and work fine if that's all you have or want to spend. 

for this purpose of this posting, the question is about what is better for this particular drive, internal vs external, so my advice is internal.

[SentaiBrad]

Well like I said in my first post, USB3 is just fine and respectable. If you have the choice, always go internal, I don't think that's ever a debate to be honest. There are other reasons you'd want an external, moving your install from PC to PC for example.

Back to prices though, the Western Digital Book series is fantastic, and I'm looking at 4TB, USB3 for $115, which isn't bad. 6TB, the next step up is also fairly affordable. The Blue drives seem to be hit and miss on stock for some sizes, but a WD Blue 4TB at $118 for internal is about right in line for that external. The second you're jumping up to 6 and 8TB's, we're talking a bigger price jump, so then it comes back to budget. It's like 128GB to 200GB, then 256GB Sandisk SD Cards. The 128 to 200 seems reasonable, but 200 to 256 is outrageous. The only reason I went for an HGST drive, was because of their very low failure rates, so that's my production drive. I only paid $5 more than this price, on this exact page in July of last year. I also bought a 5TB Toshiba, because they're also on that list of really good drives, and it was on sale last year. My 8TB is actually a WD Book drive that I pulled out of the enclosure and stuck it in internally. I found it for $250 at the time, but it's younger brother is about $220 on NewEgg now. The 8TB WD Book isn't available on Amazon. At the time, there wasn't even a page for it, the 8TB's were fairly new in single drive form last year. The page exists now, but they're out of stock and the other sellers there are selling them for higher than NewEgg. Amazon usually wins out when it's sold and shipped by Amazon them selves, with Prime.