Roms on External Hard Drive

[eric90000]

I will be moving all of my PSX roms onto an external hard drive of some sort, as they are just too big for the micro sd. I was just wondering if this will affect gameplay performance in any way, i.e. will they run slower if they are not on the internal micro sd?

What would be the best/fastest solution for external roms…..would a standard 64GB USB 2.0 memory stick be ok?

Thanks a lot!

[labelwhore]

Probably. You could use a usb hdd as well if you format it with ext4. That’s what I’ve done for some systems. there are no performance issues, but the filesystem type is very important. For example with exfat, the drive won’t be fast enough and ES will only see a handful of roms before it starts up.

[eric90000]

Thanks a lot. I’ll probably pick myself up a usb hdd and format it with ext4 like you said. usb 2.0 un-powered is cool?

[labelwhore]

A powered one would be better. (It may actually be a need.) The pi has issues when things draw too much power from it’s USB ports.

[eric90000]

Apologies for my ignorance, but how would I go about formatting a usb hdd to ext4, can it be done through the raspberry pi 2 terminal? Once the drive is ext4, what would be the procedure for copying roms onto the drive using windows 7.

Also, if I changed the usb port max voltage or used a powered usb hub, would that be sufficient for a non-powered usb hdd?

thanks again!

[rdhanded2]

I have ps1 games on an external drive. I do use a powered hub for it but I have it formatted fat32 and I have no issues. They seem to play just fine for me, though I haven’t played a ton of them yet.

[labelwhore]

[quote=115978]Apologies for my ignorance, but how would I go about formatting a usb hdd to ext4, can it be done through the raspberry pi 2 terminal? Once the drive is ext4, what would be the procedure for copying roms onto the drive using windows 7.
[/quote]
I used a GParted live cd to boot from, then formatted the drive with that. It gives you every option under the sun.

http://gparted.org/download.php

Once you have it formatted, windows can read/write to it as well.

[quote=115978]
Also, if I changed the usb port max voltage or used a powered usb hub, would that be sufficient for a non-powered usb hdd?

thanks again![/quote]
I don’t know. I’ve considered modding one of my pis to try to increase the voltage to the usb ports, but haven’t gone through with it.

[labelwhore]

[quote=115986]I have ps1 games on an external drive. I do use a powered hub for it but I have it formatted fat32 and I have no issues. They seem to play just fine for me, though I haven’t played a ton of them yet.

[/quote]
My work recently gave me a 1TB usb drive, which I’m now using with my pi. I had originally formatted it as exfat. When I put a bunch of psp .iso files on it, only about 5 showed up in ES. I tried fat32 next, which wasn’t much better. After that I tried ext4, and that works flawlessly. It’s worth mentioning that I was using a USB hub because this USB drive is unpowered.

I have another usb drive permanently connected to my pi, that I believe I have formatted as fat32. That one is not on a usb hub, is powered, but is a lot slower than the ext4 drive in terms of copying roms to the pi via SSH and onto the drives. Copying files the same way to the ext4 drive is much faster. (I found this out by mistake. lol) Since they’re both going over the network and through usb, the only difference I can conclude is the file system on each drive.

[shoothere]

@label: this might actually be the solution to a question I was going to ask. My Fat32 formatted USB stick performs very poorly when copying files to it over SSH (around 600kbyte per second) as opposed to 6-8mbyte per second when copying to the internal SD Card.

Do these values match your experience? In that case I will have to reformat.

[zerojay]

The PS1 had a double speed CD-ROM delivering 300kb/sec, so just about anything should be just fine. :)

[shoothere]

Well I do notice a longer loading time. Sure it all goes well in the end but some things do start up slower and uploading a ROM through SSH is just UGH-SLOW

Just wondering if I need a new stick is all.

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