@chishiya said in Upgrade to larger SD-card or SSD:

@dankcushions

Thank you for your in-dept pros and cons, I appreciate it a lot!
Funny you mentioned the USB-Hub because I have been thinking about that as well. How does it work out when you play like 4 people on the Hub, is there some issues with the controllers?

nope! in fact i’ve played with 5 before. it being powered may be important as excessive USB power drain can cause issues with undervolting.

You mentioned about the bottleneck of many games on the emulationstation, which Raspberry pi have you been using when you saw that? I have the 4 B version. This is my first Raspberry pi so I can't compare it unfortunately with anything...... I haven't faced any issues with the loading but yes I don't have like 100 roms hehe.

i have heard of slow boots with pi3 for sure. however this’ll anecdotal stuff from years of support. i’ve not heard of it in a while. my pi4 takes a few minutes to boot - i have several 1000 roms, but i keep it on 24/7

@wsamael I had problems with the SSD in the Nespi 4 but slightly different, I assume though because I use Attract Mode not Emulationstation. Maybe it is the same problem though. Games showed up ok for me, but the romlist is on the SD card so it should. Scrolling through it, so loading media, would be slow then freeze for a decent time before coming back. I followed the guide below and it fixed it for me, maybe it might fix your issue too?

https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroPie/comments/i9f45b/retroflag_nespi_4_ssd_boot_slowness_and_workaround/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=post_body

@mitu This is what I needed! Thanks a lot, I really appreciate it!

Quick question for your first point "Install the latest EEPROM on a microsd card, this will update the bootloader so it supports USB"

How do I get the initial "bootloader" on the micro card in the first place? Or should I just follow the link and install EEPROM straight away. Sorry if this is a silly question.

The NesPI 4 SATA controller is affected by the issue detailed in https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=245931. There's a workaround for it, described in that topic.

@solidhyunkel Hello and welcome to this forum.

See Running ROMs from a USB drive for detailed instructions about that.

@luedi thanks for suggesting this, will try it out when there is time... :)

I guess ssd device is not unmounted correctly and marked dirty because it is always mounted again after I plugged it to windows.

@wiuenright said in Are you having problems running Roms from SSD Pi4???? + Question:

Whenever I plug into the USB 3.0 it just writes non stop. I don't know what the problem is. Could it be the enclosure??? Is the lack of USB speed going to make a noticeable difference in gaming? Any ideas why this could be happening?

Try looking at the system's messages when you plug in the drive, by running dmesg -w (CTRL+C to interrupt) on the console and see if any errors are displayed.

Make sure you've updated your system (sudo apt update && sudo full-upgrade) to get the latest stable USB firmware and kernel/firmware release.

There's a sticky topic in the RPI forums here for troubleshooting problematic USB3 SSDs, you might want to take a look and see if your enclosure's USB SSD adapter could be one of the models reported with issues.

Thanks very much for the detailed reply, it seems like the benefits will outweigh the pretty minimal cost.

@mitu So I tried that just now it actually caused a 20 second delay in the start up process. So I reverted the changes and I've actually just disabled the usbmount services manually and added a line in fstab to mount /dev/sda1 as a work around. Now it boots normally every time.

@truglodite said in How can I boot RetroPie from NVMe or SSD (without SD)?:

I am guessing retropie still will write heavily to the sd card despite roms being on an external, correct? Not sure if sd wear is a big deal with retropie, so figured I'd ask if it was and if there's a similar way to mitigate.

Not really, gaming is not a write-heavy process. Game saves and save states are written to the ROM's folder by default and unpacking .zip ROMs is usually done in RAM.
There is no constant write load using RetroPie, like a monitoring/data collection/aggregation process entails, so a good sdcard and proper power source is usually enough.

@OldSchool Did you research if this is actually necessary? I used my 250 GB Samsung EVO 840 connected with an SATA-to-USB adapter to one of the USB2 ports of my Pi 3B (without +) for over two years without any problems, and now its connected to my new Pi 4B Rev 1.2 via USB3 for a month, again without any issues.

What problems exactly do you expect and where did you learn about them?

edit: I should mention that I also had/have a PacDrive LED controller for my 18 illuminated buttons and a wireless Mayflash Wii-U Pro gamepad adapter connected to the USB ports of both of my Pis, all of them without external power. The only somewhat funny "issue" I noticed is that the buttons flicker ever so slightly when the ssd is being accessed. 😊

I will try that, thanks! Sorry for being ignorant and reading the rules correctly..

On a somewhat related note: will retropie support CRT / 240p right out of the box?

Okay, there is some problem with the onboard bluetooth. The documentation already mentions that the case interferes with 2.4 GHz wifi. The same is true for bluetooth, and I added a USB bluetooth adapter to mitigate that.

Just for context, here is a comparison of uncached read performance:

SSD

$ sudo hdparm -tT --direct /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing O_DIRECT cached reads: 520 MB in 2.00 seconds = 259.69 MB/sec Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 902 MB in 3.00 seconds = 300.36 MB/sec

SD

$ sudo hdparm -tT --direct /dev/mmcblk0 /dev/mmcblk0: Timing O_DIRECT cached reads: 84 MB in 2.04 seconds = 41.13 MB/sec HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Invalid argument Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 124 MB in 3.02 seconds = 41.11 MB/sec

Definitely worth the effort to me. Instructions for making the RPi4 boot from USB can be found here, btw.