I realize you have resolved the issue, but I thought I might contribute something.

A lot of people don't realize that the quality of the MicroSD card makes a big difference for running Raspberry Pi operating systems. High-speed is important, with a minimum of Class 10 (I know, newer/faster standards now exist) always being recommended. However, the endurance of the card (or the number of writes/re-writes it can handle) is just as important. There are "high endurance" or "industrial grade" MicroSD cards available that should do a better job than run-of-the-mill MicroSDs with Class 10 ratings and will have a longer life-span.

MicroSD cards were meant for storage, for photos and the like. Running an OS from a MicroSD card causes a lot of heat due to random reads/writes happening almost constantly. For the most part, they weren't designed for this purpose and the extra wear and tear can cause early failure.

Of course, running your OS from a real SSD would be best but that's tricky to get working right on a Pi4 (and probably not worth doing on anything older).

How many games and files do you have on the external drive ?

Once EmulationStation creates the gamelists for each system, you can turn on the 'Parse Gamelists Only' option and on the next restart it will not re-scan the disc/folders.

pre made third party, I'll poke around, thanks for the heads up

@XEntombmentX Ah shucks that happened to me the first time too.
For future reference, when done transferring files, right click the disk in the manager and select "Flush Cache to Disk" and then it's ok to remove the drive.
I should have mentioned that.

Glad it solved your initial problem.

@Buckey-Jaw said in 4tb external hdd on raspberry pi model 4 running 4.6:

@mitu ahhhhh, I was waiting on the auto copy, it's formatted as ntfs, is that an issue?

You'll have to decide what format you have on the disc - is it ntfs or ext4 ?
Please use the documentation and follow the instructions - you have to choose one of the methods described there and take into account what filesystem you have.

ScreenScraper has a limit of requests per day (like TheGamesDB has) - you may be over that limit or simply their servers are too busy and they're only servicing registered users.

@bc320 I'm with you on this. With such a versatile machine like the Pi (any model) you don't know what you'll be using it some years into the future. Furthermore, Retropie runs on Linux which uses free memory to buffer I/O operations to speed up file access etc. You can see the memory allocation with the command free -h.

@bc320 you can, it will require you manually change those paths in your es_systems.cfg file though.

@KnightZ87

Have a look at this article about hdparm! There are many settings you can tweak!

Tune Your Hard Disk with hdparm:
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/Tune-Your-Hard-Disk-with-hdparm

You could also set the sleep/standby timer to a longer time!

Change hard drive's sleep/standby mode timer to reduce power consumption:
https://linuxconfig.org/change-hard-drive-s-sleep-standby-mode-timer-to-reduce-power-consumption

Spin Down and Manage Hard Drive Power on Raspberry Pi
https://www.htpcguides.com/spin-down-and-manage-hard-drive-power-on-raspberry-pi/

@Clyde said in External Boot in my image:

@MPlay Thank you for sharing your solution.

you are welcome, my next step is set retropie to stream my game play (if possible in net play mode) in my youtube channel.

thank you and other friends for support.

@mitu said in Slow writing to external HDD:

I don't know why for @pamput it wasn't set (3rd party image ?).

Nah, I probably just fiddle with it and didn't set it back to ON.

@urko948 Use the official Raspberry Pi power adapter or whatever the Raspberry guys recommend.

@steptoe Precisely!

I have been setting up my Pi2 for almost a year now and it's been quite a bumpy but rewarding ride. Bumpy because I'm not remotely tech-savy and know diddly-squat about Linux, but rewarding for the experience in itself: building the romsets, configuring emulators, choosing ES themes and now scraping roms... seeing it all come together as something that I could only dream of as a teenager is truly heartwarming.

Very soon it will be finally ready to simply plug and play! :)

@lordkramgb please fill out https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first

@mitu Ok, so i will bought a 3.0 External HD to at least transfer the games as fast as possible from my PC to the HD. But i won't have any gain when RPI is readind the data on the HD, since RPI's port is 2.0 right? btw, there is no compatibility problem if the HD is 3.0 and the RPI is 2.0, right?

@retrocraze The manual method of using USB as ROM source should work.

Reload the image and do what @lostless said.

I fixed my problem with the Y cable. The savestate are more faster, but it long.... So I have mounted my external hard drive manually by editing the fstab. All works but with Y cable only.

Thanks for your assistance. From the link you gave I used FAT32formatter, it appears to have worked. I got some error messages from the program, but it seems to be working ok.

@herb_fargus Thanks for all your work. Everything was working before I update the script and everything. Maybe you could look into it some times? the USB feature is so great, especially with all the ISOs for the systems.

Maybe something must have broken the feature. It was working with the plain 4.2 image. (though, I had some issues at the boot up which said that it could not mount my hdd but it still showed all roms and mounted it properly).