Solid State Hard Drives

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Eddie
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Solid State Hard Drives

Post by Eddie »

The Nucore system is going to be using a standard Hard Drive to save cost.
Would it be possible to simply install a solid State HD and if so how is it done, just plug and play such as a standard HD swap?
What would be the ideal memory size to get?
Is the Pinball 2000 computer run on an early version of the Solid State Drives or is it just similar and nothing like SSDs?
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Chuck
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Re: Solid State Hard Drives

Post by Chuck »

Eddie wrote:The Nucore system is going to be using a standard Hard Drive to save cost.
Would it be possible to simply install a solid State HD and if so how is it done, just plug and play such as a standard HD swap?
What would be the ideal memory size to get?
Is the Pinball 2000 computer run on an early version of the Solid State Drives or is it just similar and nothing like SSDs?
A SSD looks just like a SATA hard drive to the computer and it will work with Nucore. IMO price is too high right now and most of the drives are junk. Shortly they will become the norm though. Should have great SSD drives in a year I would guess.
Revo76
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Re: Solid State Hard Drives

Post by Revo76 »

SSD is something nice for laptops and people who want a new gadget to go with the hype.
For Pinball 2000 i would also not consider this technology.
The cost of the SDD compared with the size that you need is in a way "overkill".
I do not know how much a current install of the nucore is, but i guess that you still would have loads of space left over.
Nice of course if you want to put a lot of music on there, but i would go for a different solution.

When i had a killer instinct machine from midway, which has a hard drive in there, i was very worried how long it would last.
So i looked around on the internet to see if there were people working on this.
Luckily there was someone who made a tool to be put on a floppy.
I then build a board with a mother board on it from a megatouch game, put the original drive on there and made a clone to a different hard drive.
Before using the new hard drive, i needed to make a new Eprom, which is not that hard to do if you have those in your house or at work.
It worked, i was able to play the game from a different hard drive which was normally not possible due to build in securities.

Sadly enough, this was not enough, i wanted a more robust solution to go for.
So i bought a converter card, which connected to the hdd flatcable and then on the converter board had a slot for a Compact Flash card.
Back in those days, these cards were pretty expensive, but these days you basically get them for free with your serial breakfast.......
Some people catched onto this idea and sold conversion kits on ebay.

Since a few months, i am working for Bally Gaming, which still produces slot machines.
These slot machines also work on compact flash cards.
One is for the OS and one is for the Game.
Each machine has two compact flash cards installed.
A solid and proven technology which people can trust that it will work.
(ok, you never know if one goes bad, but still).

I have done a lot of research concerning hard drives and other technologies for another company.
This company also wanted it be cheap, reliable, etc, etc.
Since then i have been getting in touch with some companies.
One of them still makes DOM (Disk On Modules) which can be stuck right into the IDE slot on the main board.
I would rather look into that module then into SSD's.

I do not know how big the install is of the linux together with the emulation, but if it would take up a few more seconds to boot up, but be more reliable, what would you go for ?
a. spend a lot of money on speed and have the game boot up in seconds, but get the chance the drive might die within a year, or
b. Go for a more robust technology that will last you for many years and the only downside is a longer loading time before you can play the game.
( I myself would go for B).

I would also not go for USB sticks.
The reason why is because they lose their connectivity here as soon as a cellphone is in the vicinity.
USB is a nice and fast option, but unreliable when it is not shielded and protected.
Lost too many data because of that here already, "Delay write failed" messages.
Maybe it might be an option to use it with the jukebox, but i would not use it for the game itself.
Just put music on the stick and plug it in and enjoy the music.
I do not know how the buffer works, but i bet it does not matter much when the jukebox stops then when you have a game freeze up because the USB stick got lost.
And linux is not that good with auto reconnecting usb devices so you would need to shut the game off completely and turn it on again before reconnecting.
Unless you have improved the usb routine in your linux version.

The SSD drives have hit the shelves here recently, but i still leave them along since they are too expensive for home us and way too small in capacity for me.
I am more then happy with my normal IDE HDD drive for now.
If i would go for a more faster solution, i would build something to boot windows from a very fast compact flash card and keep my other items on a normal HDD.
One thing is for sure, when nucore gets released, i will have a 4 GB compact flash card ready to be installed into my K45 from Shuttle.
Got a revenge from mars almost completed here, all i need is nucore at the moment.
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