Mr. RetroLust Posted June 22, 2018 Share Posted June 22, 2018 I'm looking for a new hdd next week thats fast for loading a whole lot of data for Bigbox, I'm working on a low end pc for a while which has problems loading video's smoothly (especially bad video lag when the videos are stretched out larger in some themes and when the platform lists are long, default theme is doable with small video's but still slow loading times), it has a slower hdd and the gpu is onboard so those problems don't surprise me at all with such a cheap and old system so no problem there. I'm going to move to a 7th gen I5 with a nvidia 1080gt or something, don't have the exact specs at the moment but it's fast and new lol. Now it does need a large HDD (or Seagate's SSHD?) and I want to buy a good one for price/quality but I hope I won't need an expensive high end hdd, 4TB would be future proof. Now I would like to ask help to make the right choice, what do I have to look for to minimize/destroy any hdd lag for large video's in large lists? Is it read/seek time? and which speeds would be ideal? Flash cache or another sort of cache/buffer I should look for? I see a lot of 4tb hdd's which have 5400 rpm, would that do or do I need 7200 rpm? I would really appreciate any advice, tips or experience you could share. I'm not sure whom to ask from the team or the community so excuse me if I tagged the wrong person @DOS76 @Jason Carr @Retro808 @Lordmonkus @Kondorito Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted June 22, 2018 Share Posted June 22, 2018 1st thing I would suggest is getting a SSD to run as the OS drive. Then get a second drive and keep LB and your roms and emulators on that. A 7200 rpm Drive will definitely preform better than a drive with slower revolutions but in my experience the 5400 rpm Drive should be just fine. Depending on your needs 4TB would be fine although I would go bigger these days as the price of 6TB drives is around the same for what I payed for all of my 4TB drives but that is me and I'm a data hoarder 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted June 22, 2018 Share Posted June 22, 2018 1 hour ago, Mr. RetroLust said: I'm looking for a new hdd next week thats fast for loading a whole lot of data for Bigbox, I'm working on a low end pc for a while which has problems loading video's smoothly (especially bad video lag when the videos are stretched out larger in some themes and when the platform lists are long, default theme is doable with small video's but still slow loading times), it has a slower hdd and the gpu is onboard so those problems don't surprise me at all with such a cheap and old system so no problem there. I'm going to move to a 7th gen I5 with a nvidia 1080gt or something, don't have the exact specs at the moment but it's fast and new lol. Now it does need a large HDD (or Seagate's SSHD?) and I want to buy a good one for price/quality but I hope I won't need an expensive high end hdd, 4TB would be future proof. Now I would like to ask help to make the right choice, what do I have to look for to minimize/destroy any hdd lag for large video's in large lists? Is it read/seek time? and which speeds would be ideal? Flash cache or another sort of cache/buffer I should look for? I see a lot of 4tb hdd's which have 5400 rpm, would that do or do I need 7200 rpm? I would really appreciate any advice, tips or experience you could share. I'm not sure whom to ask from the team or the community so excuse me if I tagged the wrong person @DOS76 @Jason Carr @Retro808 @Lordmonkus @Kondorito Generally the smartest way to spend your money on hard drives is to purchase a 250 GB or 500 GB SSD. The best way to do it is to put your OS as well as LaunchBox and all your media on the SSD, and then you keep the game files themselves on a slower mechanical drive since they take up much more space and won't slow down your browsing experience in Big Box. Maybe you could keep your existing drive for that? To be honest, this day and age you're really shooting yourself in the foot if you're not running at least the OS off of an SSD. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. RetroLust Posted June 22, 2018 Author Share Posted June 22, 2018 Thanks so much @DOS76 and @Jason Carr This will help out a lot, I do have a smaller SSD with OS and other software on the new system it's around 128 gb sadly lol but enough to put the launchbox software on. You think putting the images and video's on a 4 or 6 TB drive would perhaps introduce some lag as well when on the same drive as the games? In that case would it help to split this data to separate mechanical drives or would that introduce extra work/time for the pc? Or is a much faster CPU, GPU and ram enough to lift most of that lag in comparison with the current low end system? There are these Seagate drives (I hope you guys have experience with these) which caught my attention which have 8gb of flash/ssd as a cache, it's sort of a hybrid drive which they call a SSHD (drawback I can only find them in 2tb versions here), it can cache the first 8gb on it's ssd which should give faster results than regular HDD's by not having to reload data, would this extra flashcache help Bigbox browsing in combination with 8 to 16 gb of ram and the image cache that Bigbox builds itself? As you can see I hope I don't have to buy a larger SSD as that stuff is pretty expensive. But since I do need a mechanical drive either way I could test out if there would be any lag and decide later on if the SSD is necessary. Sorry for the many questions, I'm trying to figure out a bit how it all works beforehand and plan out the strategy to tackle this, I promise I won't keep question-bombing you Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted June 22, 2018 Share Posted June 22, 2018 I have all my systems configured with LB not on the SSD and it works fine for me depending on the hardware of course. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kondorito Posted June 22, 2018 Share Posted June 22, 2018 The machine you will be moving to should not give you any problems in running videos without any lag or stutters, although there is another variable for this scenario, and it is the location of the files. You can have a great machine, but if the path of the executed files is not local, you might have some lag depending on how everything is connected/configured. I completely agree on the SSD advices above. I am moving everything to an SSD very soon (the trigger for the change in my case was the machine startup time and the time it took to launch shelled BB). My work laptop has an SSD and it boots in less than 10 seconds, so for sure it will be a huge improvement on your Front End experience. As a heads-up (even though I do not know your location worldwide), Amazon US has Samsung SSD 500GB drives for $118 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0781Z7Y3S). 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. RetroLust Posted June 22, 2018 Author Share Posted June 22, 2018 Thanks @DOS76 @Kondorito! Yeah it will be local i'm not going the NAS route, holy crap dude that is fast!. I searched for the new system specs, are these fast enough for this example of usage: I want to be able to run the main screen at 3840x2160p, 2nd screen at 2560x1080p (wide screen marquee) thousands of arcade games in a list with video and images in bigbox, running games in mame with bezel artwork (4K bezel artwork in the future) and a shader. All without lag! haha I would even be glad with 75% less lag as it is at the moment. These are the new specs: CPU: Intel Core i5 7400 (7th generation): 4x 3 GHz, Turbo 3.5 GHz RAM: 8 GB DDR4 2.400 MHz GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 - 2gb, clock: 1.354 MHz, memory: 1.752 MHz 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted June 22, 2018 Share Posted June 22, 2018 should be fine but I would personally get 16GB of RAM unless its just an emulation machine and even then I would get 16GB just in case I needed it. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. RetroLust Posted June 22, 2018 Author Share Posted June 22, 2018 3 minutes ago, DOS76 said: should be fine but I would personally get 16GB of RAM unless its just an emulation machine and even then I would get 16GB just in case I needed it. Awesome bro thanks! Then i'll save some cash on the ssd and go for 8gb extra ram and go for a 4tb instead of 6tb as I will be throwing away games I don't like, might be hoarders-sacrilege, sorry for that In the end I can save up room for the video's and images as well and put these on the main ssd when minimized in size. I'll let you know in a few weeks from now how the transition went. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. RetroLust Posted July 3, 2018 Author Share Posted July 3, 2018 I'm in the middle of the system transition now (happy happy, joy joy!!!) I bought a Toshiba 7200rpm 4TB with 128mb buffer, seems to be pretty fast with 190mb/s transfer speeds. Everything went well up to this point. Now I do want to do this right from the start as I'm a bit worried to screw anything up in the configuration. My plan is to put the Games, Images and Videos folders on this new drive (G:) and put the rest of the Launchbox installation on the (C:) drive, I can't find any xml settings where I can change these folder paths and am a bit afraid to start Launchbox in case it'll change things around automatically when not finding certain folders or anything similar. Anyone able to give me some advice on this matter? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted July 3, 2018 Share Posted July 3, 2018 its kind of convoluted how to do it you can 1 go to each platform individually and move them one category at a time which can take forever depending how many platforms you have. You may also maybe able to edit the platforms xml and find that data there but I'm not 100% sure on that. You could look up making symbolic links and do it that way which wouldn't be as fast as editing the XML but would be much quicker than editing each platfors and each category manually. https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/ 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. RetroLust Posted July 3, 2018 Author Share Posted July 3, 2018 2 hours ago, DOS76 said: its kind of convoluted how to do it you can 1 go to each platform individually and move them one category at a time which can take forever depending how many platforms you have. You may also maybe able to edit the platforms xml and find that data there but I'm not 100% sure on that. You could look up making symbolic links and do it that way which wouldn't be as fast as editing the XML but would be much quicker than editing each platfors and each category manually. https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/ Thanks bro! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. RetroLust Posted July 4, 2018 Author Share Posted July 4, 2018 Everything in the transition to the new system worked out great! I've decided not to complicate things too much and as a test put all folders including the Launchbox software folder on the new drive instead of splitting the software to the ssd and the data to the 4TB drive and it's running like a dream! So I don't even need to move the software to the SSD, it was all a breeze to do so, Retroarch didn't need any change and in Mame I just had to change 2 paths. Finally I can play those Mame 3D games without any lag (they where running mostly at 1 frame per second or something, not playable and now i'm speeding down mountains in Real time in Alpine Racer for instance) and everything I wished for above like 4K res with overlays, shaders and the ultra wide screen marquee monitor in 2560x1080 all worked out as I hoped it would. Hell I am now even able to have Launchbox.next autoplay video's, it may sound weird but I'm so incredibly happy with all of this as before my crappy low end system couldn't do all those heavier things without lag or at all, now I can finally get back to working on my game library, making new marquees and working out the theme I was working on. Thanks so much for everything @DOS76 @Jason Carr @Kondorito! Couldn't have done it without your advice! Have a great day on your side of the planet. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kondorito Posted July 4, 2018 Share Posted July 4, 2018 Cheers @Mr. RetroLust and enjoy your new retro gaming experience 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. RetroLust Posted July 4, 2018 Author Share Posted July 4, 2018 22 minutes ago, Kondorito said: Cheers @Mr. RetroLust and enjoy your new retro gaming experience Cheers bro Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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