48 vs 80 microsd Transfer Rate

Moco

Can you recommend a good cheap card above 64gb ?

herb_fargus

@Moco don't waste your money on large SD cards. Too much risk for corruption. If you're looking for scale just use a portable hard drive and run your roms from there.

Moco

Should I choose an external drive over a USB drive as well?

herb_fargus

@Moco personal preference really. Either will work.

Rion

Have a look here
http://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/microsd-cards

I would go for Samsung Pro 16gb for Retropie and a USB stick from a reputable manufacturer like Sandisk or something else.

raymate

2nd the Samsung, I'm using the EVO and EVO+, waiting for a PRO to go on sale.

I'm also using Lexar 300x and 600x and the odd SanDisk then a very fast Kingston 95/45

But for sure watch who you buy from many fakes are out there. Would never buy from eBay I tend to use Amazon and HighStreet Stores
If it's from Amazon make sure it says shipped and sold by Amazon. High Street stores and big box stores tend to be only good deals when on sale.

I tend to use 16 and 32 size.

Moco

@raymate thanks a lot for the help!

My next question is, if I have both a micro SD card and a usb drive plugged in, will it pull games from both storage drives and have a nice list of games without having to go to separate drives to access them?

raymate

@Moco I don't know I don't run a USB stick, I have all my games on the SD card. But I would also like to know this.
How does retropie work with another drive attached. Do we need to set something or will it detect.

I was under the impression that if you had a USB stick with games on it would copy them to the SD card

ShootHere

It will detect the drive fine (if it formatted as FAT32 with MBR).

@raymate you mean the USB copy thing, it is off by default I think.

@Moco I personally edit the path of the roms in /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg (a quick find & replace all to just quickly change all the paths of the roms) and change the SRM path to a directory on the USB drive as well in /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg so that my save files are on there as well.

Moco

sorry but I have one last question, it's only 20$ more to get a terabyte external hard drive, the HD I'm looking at has no power supply, it runs off a USB cable. My question is, will this be bad for the pi?

herb_fargus

@Moco you'll need a powered USB hub to run your harddrive