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will lanchbox work with this drive?


A Retro guy

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theres this 8TB external usb hardrive or whatevers that im thinking of getting to store my launchbox stuff.  but the problem is that a youtuber called unbox junkie made a video called "Budget Friendly External Hard Drive 8TB". and it talks about this drive that i want to get but at 4:14 he says that he dosent really recomend to put your steam stuff in this drive. im worring that that might be the same case with launchbox but is it a good idea to put my lauchbox collection into this drive or not?

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Generally speaking, games on Steam are modern pc games. 100+ GB in size is no exception. They require fast storage for booting, loading and swapping data in and out of memory, especially texture data. SSD's are pretty much a must for modern pc games. Retro games are generally MUCH smaller in size and even emulated systems that are fairly recent had no more than a mechanical hard drive to begin with. Although I still would recommend a Sata SSD if you are going to emulate recent systems, even then a (USB 3) hard drive is absolutely fine. Let alone for older systems. One thing to look out for though. High density hard drives can use Shingled Magnetic Recording https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording which slows read/write operations down. And as I don't have experience with USB drives and emulation, USB drives don't have fixed drive letters by default. But that would be easy to solve, I think. BTW, I don't know the youtuber "Unbox Junkie", but for reviews I would look for more specialized youtubers or respected techsites.

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No idea why that HDD you mention would not be suitable for LB? Basically any external HDD is good. I don't even see a difference between brands and/or sizes. Absolutely no need for SSD if it's for LB. My PS3 games run just fine from external HDD. 

You can easily set your USB disk's drive letter in Windows disk management, and once it's set, and you don't plug it in/out all the time and connect other external disks, it keeps the same letter.  

Edited by DeadVoivod
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45 minutes ago, DeadVoivod said:

No idea why that HDD you mention would not be suitable for LB? Basically any external HDD is good. I don't even see a difference between brands and/or sizes. Absolutely no need for SSD if it's for LB. My PS3 games run just fine from external HDD. 

You can easily set your USB disk's drive letter in Windows disk management, and once it's set, and you don't plug it in/out all the time and connect other external disks, it keeps the same letter. 

It all depends on what the o.p.'s use case is. If the main goals is mobility, sure an external HDD is absolutely fine. But is you're going to fill 8 TB to the brim with games, frontend artwork and play recent emulators, then an large internal HDD + (Sata) SSD for image and emulator cache would be ideal.

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