Does the transfer speed of the SD card effect the performance while playing? If it does which SD card do you recommend for the best value disregard space.

No, it does not, but it certainly helps in day-to-day operations (boot process, updates, copying files, etc.).

@sleve_mcdichael said in USB FILE STRUCTURE:

nto the

Awesome again dudes thankyou very much

@wmarcio Worked great. I had tried Aomei Partition Manager Pro, but it just couldn't make a bootable clone. Go figure. Win32imager did the trick.

I then just went into RASP Setup/Advanced Settings and expanded the file system. From 32GB to 256GB and twice the speed. Very likely major overkill, but it was cheap and will remove all concerns for the time being.

@matchaman I saw that image too, but didn't look into it, because I thought its a SIM card. So, these are essentially Nano sd cards. But they are only produced by Huawei, so maybe not a standard soon. https://nasilemaktech.com/nm-card/

Interesting reading. Which systems that the Pi4 can emulate would actually be affected by the read speed that USB2 or SD cards can deliver?

I usually transfer new games from my phone or my PC so my WI/FI and Ethernet speeds would probably be the limiting factor for writing speed for me.

@efriim

Have used these instructions a few times and worked well.
https://medium.com/@andreas.schallwig/how-to-make-your-raspberry-pi-file-system-read-only-raspbian-stretch-80c0f7be7353

The disk I plan on leaving attached. I'll look into options for mount; is option "nofail" supposed to mean that it will give up trying to mount if it is non-available?

systemd-analyze blame
the top four are nmbd.service 10.8s and hciuart.service 6.4s
then raspi-config.service 1.3s and smbd.service 1s

one is the net bios name server i was pretty sure I dont use that so i disabled it with
sudo systemctl stop nmbd
sudo systemctl disable nmbd

I do use bluetooth, It seems like it is unusually slow. Reading dmesg:
uart-pl011 3f201000.serial: no DMA platform data
brcmfmac: power management disabled
and brcmfmac: brcmf_c_preinit_dcmds; look like firmware warnings

raspi-config is probably nominal, though I don't know what it is calling or doing at startup.

I use samba smbd.service.

Should work, although I'd use an USB stick for this kind of storage size and get a smaller 16 GB SD card. Makes backups easier and I think would be also cheaper.

@timekills Thanks for that! Even after 13 years of Linux, I didn't know of this program. For others who might be interested, here's a more elaborate guide about progress:

https://www.tecmint.com/progress-monitor-check-progress-of-linux-commands/

@matchaman An image is exactly that. A snapshot of the complete file structre including all data AND blank space. As was said, you would need to use a disk management tool to shrink the image and remove some empty space in order to fit onto a smaller card. Again, I've never done this myself.

You might would consider upgrading to a bigger sized micro sd card. 8 gb is usually the minimum as the OS will require a good part of the available free size of the micro sd card to be be installed.

I would say an 8 gb or even better a 16 gb micro sd card should be sufficient.

I have 160 now across atari2600, gb, gba, gbc, nes, snes, and arcade. And I think I need to stop adding new ones. But I can see how that will never happen. ;)

Some games I will literally never play like some of the atari2600 ones but they are there for the nostalgia and for my kids to see so they can experience the games I grew up with.

@877
You might also try PeaZip. It's built around 7-zip with better GUI and more compression formats supported.

@Rion You can still view files separately in their original folders.

It doesn't need to be formatted if writing the image to it as that contains all the partition information.

I've cloned my 8gb to a 64gb with win32diskimager, after that you can expand the partition with easuspartitionmanager.
It works great ;)

@cyperghost thank you. That solved it. I set a permanent automount point for my HDD, then deleted my existing roms folder as I had no plans to store any on the pi SD card. Symlinked to the folder and I was good to go!

You need a class 10 rating Micro SD card for effective read/write access and reliability, so maybe a SanDisk micro SDXC - UHS-I around 64 to 128GB.