Heh, just configured Ikaruga and i am currently playing it from my DevBox's hard drive.No noticable differences as Ikaruga did not have any long load times...Guess i can make a bad ass score and graba proper screenshot now I 'll try more games when i find some time and some of them ripped as i have no way to rip a gd now
wow really nice!, maybe you can put an big ass HD in the devunit? and put an big batch of games on it? (or how about, shenmue from HD... no more loading times!!)
Does it use standard E-IDE/ATA hard disks? And is there a possible capacity limit? I think a lot of Pentium III boards from around that era had a limit somewhere around 130GB.
it uses SCSI HDD - IDE is mega inferior, performance is required not size. I was going to drop a 15k rpm hdd with 3.4ms seek times in there (worlds fastest HDD) but before I got round to modding it I sold it :-(
IDE is progressing far better than SCSI The system still may have problems with drives larger than 137Gb.
IDE is only progressing at best to SCSI 2, SCSI 3 devices still rule the roost but SATA is catching up unfortunately. If more people wanted raw performance then SCSI could have evoloved long ago and come down in price, but people want large slow ass cheap drives so it never really went into public favour. Fibre Channel SCSI is the undisputed king though it's a shame it's so god damned expensive and only really used for servers - you don't see SATA or IDE having 2Gb transfer rates though or 3.4ms seek times :smt043 I guess they're happy enough with 150mb / 9ms :smt083
I get about 22MB/s on my crappy Pentium III with an 80GB Seagate Barracuda. I think the motherboard only does ATA 66 :smt022
What do you think SATA is? It's serial IDE SCSI has it's advantages but there are 15K RPM SATA drives now too. Soon (5 years) the only advantage will be the amount of devices you can daisy chain.
its not all about speed. Scsi is far more reliable and give less erros over a period of time. thats whay all severs etc use Scsi. ATA is great for home useres etc, but just not as reliable.
There is also build quality too. My last Drive (IBM Ultrastar 36Z15) was made from ceramic plates! Could defrag it all day long for a decade and it would still be in tip top condition, whilst doing the same to a standard drive would have killed it long ago ;-)
On the subject of defragging, the crappy little 80MB disk in my 386 was NEVER defragged until I finally upgraded to DOS 6.22... in 2001 - 9 years after buying the thing! The difference it made was astronomical, to say at the least.
don´t worry... those 2gb per seconds is only a THEORETICAL value (which the controller could handle if the hard drive was fast enough- so it has reserves when more hd´s are hooked up - I quit with PC´s in 98, so I don´t know how how much the transfer rates have progressed, but they will be well below that 2gb/s - unless you transfer a file small enough to fit into the hd´s cache, which is cheating anyways, since the hd has to load the data first
