Is there a way to limit/disable LB from writing to disk?

[DaveC1964]

So I wanted to have an SD card/thumbdrive/SSD with LB and my ROMs stored on it.  I would need probably .5 up to1 TB.   I notice LB does a lot of writing to cards for things like number of times a game is played etc.  I don't care about that stuff, at all.  As you know flash memory has limited write cycles and I don't want to burn it with useless stuff (to me).  Yes I know someone is going to tell me how many times it can be done due to write leveling but if a card is full that doesn't work anymore.  Also every time you write to one of these devices there is a risk of corrupting the card.  Anything can happen such as power outage, bugs in the software or OS etc.   The risk may be rather small but I would like it to be zero (I actually have had cards go bad during a write, not LB caused though).

Is there a way to shut off functions that automatically write stuff to the card?

[Jason Carr]

Not currently. You could try making files read-only, but you might run into some errors.

[DaveC1964]

Hopefully something like that could be added.  Some kind of option in the settings to "disable disk writing" or something like that.   Once enabled a disclaimer could come up such as "disabling writes will disable game play date and count" or something like that.

I have doubts as to the reliability of large capacity micro SD cards if you constantly are writing to them, I would hate to have to keep buying new ones for silly things like play counts/date. Does anyone really care about that I wonder?

 

[neil9000]

8 hours ago, DaveC1964 said:

Hopefully something like that could be added.  Some kind of option in the settings to "disable disk writing" or something like that.   Once enabled a disclaimer could come up such as "disabling writes will disable game play date and count" or something like that.

I have doubts as to the reliability of large capacity micro SD cards if you constantly are writing to them, I would hate to have to keep buying new ones for silly things like play counts/date. Does anyone really care about that I wonder?

 

To be honest with you running Launchbox from a SD or USB stick isnt really a good idea. Those storage formats are designed for storage/transfers of files like images/movies/exe's and the like. The speeds you see advertised on those devices are continuouss wright/Read speeds for decently sized files. The speeds of random write/Reads are hugely slower, and that is what any program being run from one would be doing, constantly reading and writing files, as would any program.

Its not just those specific things you mention like play date and count, every time you move the wheel to a different platform/game launchbox has to fetch the game info and all associated images and videos, and on a device of this type that has very slow 4K random read/write speeds thats going to be a issue.

I would recommend just keeping the roms themselves on that sort of device as they are single files and are quicker to retrieve than random files of the program.

[Darkseid001]

Anyone know where to get sega dreamcast bezels?

[DaveC1964]

On 7/12/2019 at 5:44 AM, neil9000 said:

To be honest with you running Launchbox from a SD or USB stick isnt really a good idea. Those storage formats are designed for storage/transfers of files like images/movies/exe's and the like. The speeds you see advertised on those devices are continuouss wright/Read speeds for decently sized files. The speeds of random write/Reads are hugely slower, and that is what any program being run from one would be doing, constantly reading and writing files, as would any program.

Its not just those specific things you mention like play date and count, every time you move the wheel to a different platform/game launchbox has to fetch the game info and all associated images and videos, and on a device of this type that has very slow 4K random read/write speeds thats going to be a issue.

I would recommend just keeping the roms themselves on that sort of device as they are single files and are quicker to retrieve than random files of the program.

Yes but some computers use SSDs which are more sensitive to writing.  Corruption can occur when writing all of the time even if you don't run out of write cycles.  With SSDs it can be catastrophic when there is an error and it can nuke your whole drive.  Conventional HDDs are more rubust as usually only a file will be bad.  Having to re-do your whole system just to have frivolous things is not worth it to me. 

Also not everyone is using all of the features like videos etc.  Some use the front end just as a front end, just to load games quickly.  I can see using all of that stuff if you like that but it should also be flexible enough to do what the user wants.  Some love all of the flash and fluff, some don't care about it.  That is why I just suggest an option to disable all of that stuff if you want to save your SSD etc.

[neil9000]

 

6 hours ago, DaveC1964 said:

Yes but some computers use SSDs which are more sensitive to writing.  Corruption can occur when writing all of the time even if you don't run out of write cycles.  With SSDs it can be catastrophic when there is an error and it can nuke your whole drive.  Conventional HDDs are more rubust as usually only a file will be bad.

Every single program on your PC will write data to the disk, Launchbox is not a special use case in that regard. I'm betting if you have a SSD in your system you are running Windows from it right? That will be writing and reading from your precious SSD every second of every day that your PC is on, but i don't expect you have been to the Microsoft support site asking them to release a build of Windows that never writes to your drives, right? That would be a ridiculous thing to ask for right? Why should Launchbox be any different?

6 hours ago, DaveC1964 said:

Also not everyone is using all of the features like videos etc.  Some use the front end just as a front end, just to load games quickly.

Then maybe you should just be loading your games from the desktop and not using a frontend at all. The point of a frontend is to organise and display your games in a attractive and organised way, to enable you to quickly choose a game and launch it. Having screenshots and videos of the games in your collection is a good and attractive way to organise and see what a game is about before loading it, this is EXACTLY the use case for a frontend.  

6 hours ago, DaveC1964 said:

That is why I just suggest an option to disable all of that stuff if you want to save your SSD etc.

This would mean a complete redesign and re-code of the program in order to support your frankly weird phobia of programs making use of the SSD you have.

The only way you are going to be able to save your precious SSD is to not use a frontend at all and to simply load a game from the desktop, while the whole time Windows is reading a writing thousands of files every minute.

[neil9000]

Also to add i have two SSD's in my system a seven months old NVME boot drive that has 15.4TB of write usage on it that is still classed as "Good" condition, just as it was when it was new.

I also have a 5 year old SSD that i keep Launchbox on, that has had 62.7TB of writes to it and it also is still classed with being in "Good" status just like it was when new.

So i think you are really over exaggerating how much writing SSD's are rated for, for example my NVME boot drive comes with a 5 year guarantee, or 600TB written.

[DaveC1964]

On 7/16/2019 at 4:52 AM, neil9000 said:

Also to add i have two SSD's in my system a seven months old NVME boot drive that has 15.4TB of write usage on it that is still classed as "Good" condition, just as it was when it was new.

I also have a 5 year old SSD that i keep Launchbox on, that has had 62.7TB of writes to it and it also is still classed with being in "Good" status just like it was when new.

So i think you are really over exaggerating how much writing SSD's are rated for, for example my NVME boot drive comes with a 5 year guarantee, or 600TB written.

 

Well one of the devices I run on is a GPD Win 2 because I like to have some portable gaming.  The SSD in that is probably the cheapest crap they could find.  I highly doubt it is anywhere near as robust as the Sammy ones like you have.   If it had those in it I wouldn't worry.

Also if an Android version was done as was talked about I would be concerned about those too.  There are many tablets, phones, etc that have an even worse flash memory drive in them and could get corrupted even easier.

Edited July 18, 2019 by DaveC1964