Will RetroPie work with a 4tb External drive?

hansolo77

In theory I would say yes. I have a 1tb WD Passport drive in my NES build, and it works perfectly. However, in practice, I can't figure out how to get my new build to work with a 4tb one. I went with a larger drive so I could have my cd-image based games installed on it, along with video previews inside ES. The problem I'm trying to wrap my head around is that the FAT32 format (required via the docs) seems to have a capacity limit of 2tb. I can get around that by making 2 or more partitions, but I wasn't sure if RetroPie would still work with that. I know in Windows, creating multiple partitions requires formatting and assigning a drive letter to each one. I assume (not knowing a whole lot about the OS) that the same would be true in Linux.

I'm also thinking about maybe building symbolic links. Where the default working file structure has a path going out to /roms/"system". In place of each system, have a symbolic link going to the location that exists on a different partition. That way ES and everything is still looking for the files in the correct location, but in reality they're someplace else.

Does that seem at all possible? I guess in other words, it it possible to have multiple drives for storing roms (like for instance an SD card AND a USB drive)?

Oh and I'm planning this build using a Raspberry Pi 3. :)

hansolo77

Actually on second thought.. does Linux require the USB drive to formatted in FAT32? In my researching a way around all this, I found some documentation that would let me format it in other formats (via Linux) including NTFS which Windows can do. Why can't I just use that? If Linux can already make that format, surely it can read it?

For reference.. see here: (linked from our own docs!)
https://ksearch.wordpress.com/2010/09/29/format-usb-in-linux/
It's about half way down, with instructions to format to NTFS

edmaul69

@hansolo77 yes you can use an ntfs hard drive on the pie.

Capeman

I'm guessing you're also going to be adding a Kodi media collection, haha, all the roms retropie could ever run would probably fit on a 500gb drive, haha.

I was actually curious if you could use FAT or NTSC drives on retropie though, rom management would be really easy with that kind of setup, unplug it from the pi, update your games, lists and art on a Mac or PC, and plug back in.

edmaul69

@Capeman the u.s. Playstation roms alone is 500gb in the smaller eboot format. with all the playstation, dreamcast, 3do, pcfx, saturn, sega cd and pc engine cd roms you could easily exceed far more than 4 terabytes

Capeman

This is true... maybe I'm thinking all the collections minus the crap titles.

obsidianspider

@hansolo77 Linux itself doesn't require FAT32, but the "auto-mount USB drive as an alias of your retropie directory" functionality does require FAT32.

TMNTturtlguy

What if you were to use 2 2gb drives? Takes up 2 usb slots but here is my thought, not sure it will work but what if you were to mount 1 drive, so that works as normal usb mount. Then create symlinks to the 2nd drive which should be recognized under media. I would try to create a folder on your SD Card, something like this:

/home/pi/symlinks

place your roms/files on our 2nd usb device which should be pathed to /media/usb1 or somthing like that and then link them to the symlinks folder on the SD card.

cd /home/pi/symlinks
ln - s /media/usb1/roms/psx/hooters\ road\ trip.iso

Make sure your es-systems.cfg points to /home/pi/symlinks for its path

Just a theory, but now your pi will pull the files from the mounted 2tb drive by default and will also look for files on the sd card which is a linux partition and then link to the files on the second 2tb drive.

Anyone have thoughts on that? I don't have a way to test it right now, but i could try it with a second usb stick later.

hansolo77

I just thought of symlinks as a last ditch suggestion. I wouldn't really want to go to all the trouble symlinking 2tb's of files.. :/

But yes.. @edmaul69 has the idea I'm going for. A dedicated system for CD-Image based games. I have a cherry picked setup right now, with cd games from Playstation and Sega CD. I've yet to venture into Dreamcast/Saturn because I was under the impression those systems aren't fully functional on a Pi. The 3DO I'm not even sure I'm interested in.. never actually played on one before so I wouldn't know what to get. PCFC/PCEngine CD there's a few goodies.. and there's also the Amiga 32CD. And if you want a full MAME rom set, with functioning CHD's, and Daphne.. you're talking some serious storage requirements.

This is more or less a test.. proof on concept type deal. Honestly, at the moment I'm just looking to build a dedicated PlayStation set, out of an old PlayStation, that has every PlayStation game on it. I plan on devising a way to separate out the roms off the main menu.. as "USA", "Europe", and "Asia". Then of course there'd also be the "RetroPie" menu, and maybe PSP if I ever decide to go that far. So that, with video previews, is going to eat up all the space. I just wanted to know if the Pi was capable of reading from NTFS format, or if the FAT32 was necessary. After thinking about it and reading a bit more, I figured it was a format required for USB sticks, as they typically don't format to NTFS anyway.

Now @obsidianspider's comment has be concerned...

@obsidianspider said in Will RetroPie work with a 4tb External drive?:

@hansolo77 Linux itself doesn't require FAT32, but the "auto-mount USB drive as an alias of your retropie directory" functionality does require FAT32.

Are you saying in order for RetroPie to access the "/home/pi/retropie" path, it has to exist on a FAT32 drive? Meaning I can't do the USB automount bit's from here?
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive/#configure-fstab-to-automatically-mount-usb-drive

Capeman

@hansolo77 said in Will RetroPie work with a 4tb External drive?:

I've yet to venture into Dreamcast/Saturn because I was under the impression those systems aren't fully functional on a Pi

I've tried to get saturn working, i get about 5 fps on lr-yabause. Until somebody ports the mednafen saturn core to libretro AND the raspberry pi literally quadruples in spec, theres little chance of saturn working acceptably any time soon.

hansolo77

There's only 1 game on Saturn (exclusive) that I even know about, and that's Nights into Dreams. I've never even played it. So if the possibilities arrive, that's probably the only game I'd ever even play.

edmaul69

@hansolo77 i dont go through the process people use to read their roms off of an hdd. I just edit my es_systems.cfg and tell it to look for my roms at /media/usb0/ Last time i tried to do the method of making it use the hard drive the home pi, it formatted the hard drive to a linux partition and my windows pc wouldnt recognize it as it was now a linux partition. And the only way to see it was through an ftp program and transferring all my roms through that method, which was a no go for me. So i have just been using an edited es_systems.cfg the whole time.

Capeman

@hansolo77 said in Will RetroPie work with a 4tb External drive?:

There's only 1 game on Saturn (exclusive) that I even know about, and that's Nights into Dreams. I've never even played it. So if the possibilities arrive, that's probably the only game I'd ever even play.

Saturn Bomberman is an exclusive that only came out on saturn, and it is pretty much the best bomberman game in the whole series.

Capeman

Also Panzer Dragoon, its a pretty badass rail shooter.

Capeman

Oh and lets not forget... DAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYY TTOOOOOOOO NNNNAAAAAAAAAA

hansolo77

So I played around a bit, got a new SD card with the image on it.. did all the typical tweaks (enable wifi, disable overscan). I then followed the guide up to editing the fstab. Plugged in the UUID appropriate for my drive, and used this command:

UUID=********  /home/pi/RetroPie      ntfs    rw,exec,uid=pi,gid=pi,umask=022 0       2

Essentially, I'm using the vfat example in the guide, and just changed it to ntfs. The rest of the options I'm not sure what are for, but it looks like user permissions (like read/write/execute/etc) for the path and it's specifying the user as pi so I left that in there from the example. I'm not sure about the umask bit, so I just left it too. If somebody can clarify on what all those are, I'll edit my setting if needed. But for the most part, it looks like it's working. I was SFTP'd into the Pi prior to rebooting. I could access /home/pi and everything else on the system just fine, but not /home/pi/retropie. However, after rebooting, that last /retropie/ bit opened up and gave me access to things like the bios and roms subfolders. So I'm assuming that means the automount DID work. The only way I'll know for sure is if I transfer in bunch of files over 8gb, because that's the limit of my SD card. :)