Rik3Rr Posted August 25, 2021 Share Posted August 25, 2021 Hi all, I am running Launchbox off of a 1TB NVME external drive. Additionally, I'm storing all my ROMs on this drive. When I first bought this drive, I thought that it would be more than enough for my curated list of ROMs. I ran into a surprising discovery when I realized that I only have 675GB of actual data stored on the NVME, but it reads that the drive is nearly full! It seems that about ~225GB of data is being "used" by the drive, but I can't explain it. I've read online that this can happen with NVMEs (after buying this drive, of course!). Is there something that I'm doing wrong, or something I can do to recover the 225GB of space? Also, would I really see any performance difference if I moved my whole Launchbox setup to a regular SSD or even an HDD? Thanks in advance for any help provided! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lordmonkus Posted August 25, 2021 Share Posted August 25, 2021 Losing space on a drive is normal due to formatting and the fact the drive manufacturers round up the number. There is no reason at all to be storing roms on an SSD. The files are relatively tiny and do not gain any benefit from faster load times. SSDs are best utilized for the OS and large open world games with longer load times. Now having said that, there is some benefit to having LB installed on an SSD if you have a massive library imported due to the large xml files and media to go with it but personally I don't think it's worth it either. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neil9000 Posted August 25, 2021 Share Posted August 25, 2021 Also its worth noting that for SSD's there is a thing called "over provisioning" which its recommended to use, and this leaves part of the drive empty, and helps with performance, this amount i believe is recommended to be around 20% of total available space. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted August 25, 2021 Share Posted August 25, 2021 Just to clarify, if you want the best performance, you should definitely put your LaunchBox install and your LaunchBox media on an SSD. It really does make a world of difference. That said, yeah, there's really no reason to put your entire ROM collection on an SSD. The ROMs themselves can be safely kept on a traditional spinning hard drive without any perceived performance loss. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rik3Rr Posted August 25, 2021 Author Share Posted August 25, 2021 Thank you all for the replies! I'm thinking of moving my whole LB setup to a spinning HDD enclosure OR just building a simple Batecera emulation PC with spare parts I have lying around following my recent gaming PC build. I'm leaning toward the latter. If I do that, then I'll keep all ROMs on a spinning HDD, and keep LB on a regular 2.5" SSD. I'm glad that I'm not missing anything with the whole "lost" 200GB+ of data on the NVME. I'll take everything off of that and use it to stare my photo and video editing stuff. Those things will very much benefit from an NVME. Take care, all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rik3Rr Posted August 25, 2021 Author Share Posted August 25, 2021 One more question: is it OK to run Launchbox, the emulators, and all ROMs off of a 2TB flash drive? I'm guessing "no" because flash drives aren't as reliable as an HDD or SSD. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lordmonkus Posted August 25, 2021 Share Posted August 25, 2021 It'll work but it would hurt performance significantly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rik3Rr Posted August 26, 2021 Author Share Posted August 26, 2021 3 hours ago, Lordmonkus said: It'll work but it would hurt performance significantly. Thanks much for the reply! I'll avoid doing so. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neil9000 Posted August 26, 2021 Share Posted August 26, 2021 13 hours ago, Rik3Rr said: One more question: is it OK to run Launchbox, the emulators, and all ROMs off of a 2TB flash drive? I'm guessing "no" because flash drives aren't as reliable as an HDD or SSD. Flash drives are fine for moving and storing large single files, but a program like launchbox would be constantly reading and writing to the stick, and that part they dont do very well at all. They are designed for storage and occasional access not constant reading/writing like a HDD or SSD. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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