Challenge: Game System HD

[Dr. Ffreeze]

Hello All,

Just been mulling over a few ideas and I thought maybe some of you could come up with some other ideas I have not thought about.

Problem: I have, hmmm, I would guess over 100 games that will run on a WinXP box. I have (1) 27GB and (1) 18 GB drive. I cannot install all of my games, let alone all of my applications. I would like to change this and install everything I have. I might also want to make it easy to move this HD(s) to a new system someday.

Current System: (important parts)
AMD Athlon XP 1900+ oc'ed to 2000+ (dummm board won't run a higher multiplier)
Abit KX7 333 (NO raid)
ATI 9500 Pro 128 MB
(1) 27 GB HD
(1) 18 GB HD

I was thinking of:

1] Buy a Raid controller card and (2) Samsung 5400 rpm 120 GB HD's (cheap $80). I do not need fast 7200 rpm drives, but if I need two I might as well Raid 0 them. Because I would be using a raid card, I would be able to move the array to a new system much easier than if it was using an onboard raid controller.

2] Buy a new motherboard with on board raid. Either get an NForce 2 Ultra 400 to reuse my current CPU or get a Abit IC7-G for overclocking goodness but much more costly. This would be the fastest current solution, but also the quite expensive. I would also have to rebuild the array if I ever got a new motherboard (something I would REALLY like to avoid).

3] Setup a server on my home network with every CD I own on some sort of Virtual Drive. Every PC that hooks up to my network could then install the apps/games I want with the smallest install. This way if my wife installs an app, and I do too, we won't take 2x the HD space. This would be the coolest, but also the costly AND most expensive. It would also be fun to setup but I would guess it could be very frustrating at the same time. I see that Farstone Virtual Drive and Game Drive Pro look interesting. The Game Drive Pro has a live update to stay current so you can use it with all the latest games (very nice feature)(http://www.farstone.com) Probably too much of a pain but kinda interesting to thing about...

Any other ideas out there?
Dr. Ffreeze

 

[epicstruggle]

your third option might sound cool, but will be limited to the bandwith from the file server to your computers.

a raid card might do the best job for the least amount of money.

do you really need to have every cd/game on your computer?

later,

 

[Tim Murray]

Indeed. If you have 100 games, you probably don't play the vast majority of them very often. I'd say go with the cheap RAID config... but still, that doesn't make that much sense to me. Oh well.

 

[Dr. Ffreeze]

epicstruggle,

I just got a Play Station 2. I fought it for a long time, but really enjoyed playing games co-op with my wife. Sometimes it's just too much of a pain to get setup and started with PC games (Honey only has a 10GB HD, Diablo II + Baulder's Gate = 5 GB). It was quite refreshing to want to play a game, any PS2 game I own,and play it. I would like to do the same thing on my PC! Heck, I BOUGHT the games and apps. I want to be able to USE them on my whim. =)

Dr. Ffreeze

 

[Pete]

I'd advise against RAID 0 in any case, as it doubles the chance of you losing all your data (if one HD goes, so does the other).

Buying one fast 7200rpm 8MB cache IDE drive would be a better choice than RAIDing two 5400rpm HD's, IMO. With that much data, though, I'd start to get nervous about the time it'd take to back it up or reinstall, so I'd have to recommend a RAID 1 solution (two of the same HD's mirroring each other).

I'm a big fan of Virtual Daemon. Ripping a backup to your HD and using that as if it were a CD is very nice and very fast (no spin-up time), particularly if you have to insert it everytime you want to play. It's nice if your game doesn't have a no-CD patch available.

 

[Crusher]

Raid 1 wastes a lot of space, though. It's not as though these are critical applications or data disks that he needs to be able to recover. It's just games. Raid 0 sounds like it's good enough to me. If you're lucky, the drives won't fail for years. And you could always get a tape backup system in case one does.

 

[Rob M]

One advantage of 3 might be acessing the images from more than one client - perhaps not the same one though. But you'd want at least 100TX ethernet.