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    Please do not post a support request without first reading and following the advice in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first

    Slow boot with roms on USB

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    • B
      Brandito
      last edited by

      I'm running retropie 4.3 on a raspberry pi 3. I used the guide to automatically copy my roms from sd to USB with USB ROM service. Everything works great except boot times have doubled or possibly tripled.

      At first I thought maybe it was reading roms from both the SD and USB thus doubling the time, however after installing retropie on a fresh sd card with no roms on it and booting with my usb rom drive installed I saw no change in boot time.

      Next someone on reddit suggested my usb drive, a Samsung Fit 128GB flash drive, might have poor 4k random reads compared to my Samsung EVO Select 128GB microsd card. After testing with fio and crystal disk mark I realized they were right.

      Next thing I did was bought a PNY Elite 240GB portable ssd. It's certainly overkill in the speed department, but I'll also have double the storage and it still fits in my nespi case.

      After testing the PNY drive in CDM and fio, it beats the SD card and flash drive in sequential reads as well as 4k and latency. However the slow boots persist.

      Is there something I'm missing? Is this just an inherently slower method of booting into emulationstation? Has anyone else experienced this?

      edmaul69E 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • edmaul69E
        edmaul69 @Brandito
        last edited by

        @brandito i have a slow boot with my 1tb hard drive. The more stuff you have the longer it takes. So as you keep adding stuff it gets slower. Takes like a minute to boot for me.

        B 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • B
          Brandito @edmaul69
          last edited by

          @edmaul69 this is independent of the number of roms.

          Same number of roms on the SD as the USB drive yet the USB drive takes much much longer to boot.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • B
            Brandito
            last edited by

            Made some progress. Formatted the drive to NTFS and that sped things up considerably. I assume the wiki uses FAT32 specifically for flash drives and windows compatibility, though I'm not sure why they don't suggest exFAT.

            Right now I'm working on testing if exFAT is faster or slower than NTFS.

            I wish I'd known the usbromservice was more accepting of different file systems from the get go.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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