Can Retropie run on a 1TB powered external harddrive?

[WDSnav91]

Well I am buying a Pi bundle https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01C6Q2GSY/ and I was wondering using up-to-date methods how would I achieve this? I have heard of helper scripts that can direct it to your pi to the harddrive. Well from my findings, SD cards are a horrible ripoff and I got this 1TB self-powered drive that I am not using that I would like I would like to store everything on it as obviously that is way more than one of SD card and actually way cheaper. Has anyone done this successfully?

I think if I install just raspberry OS on a SD Card and ran the proper commands that it would copy everything over to the hard drive and I could install Retropie onto it and everything would go right. am I correct or wrong..

[backstander]

@WDSnav91
I think either way, you're going to need an SD card for the OS but you can host all your ROMs on the external hard drive using this tutorial:
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive

You can just buy an 8-16GB SD card for this (which is much cheaper than a 64GB) and you're probably going to have to format that external hard drive to FAT32 for it to work correctly with this setup (I think NTFS format would be "read only" but I could be mistaken).

[WDSnav91]

Thanks; I happen to have 2 32GB SD Cards and a 64GB one. I should be able to do this.

[MWGemini]

@WDSnav91 Check this out: http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd-pidrive-berryboot-edition/

[edmaul69]

@MWGemini wd also sell a hard drive enclosure the the official raspberry pi case sits on.

[joyrider3774]

i'm using the pidrive 1 TB edition for my picade with retropie.

i'm powering my whole picade, pidrive, screen, usb keyboard all with a single power adaptor (the official 3a one). Works perfect. Although i'm not using the berryboot SD card and i did not install the (retropie) system itselve on the harddisk but on a sd card. Only my roms and assets are located on the pidrive, this way i can easily swap systems and roms remain intact. I'm using the system from retropie toolkit to use my external disk as a roms storage. (see https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/7780/loading-roms-from-usb-harddrive)

watch out this script uses http://eazyhax.com/pitime/expand_to_external_drive.sh and adds avoid_warnings=2 to /boot/config.txt so remove it afterwards or you won't get notified anymore about undervoltage and high temprature warnings !