How do I know what size SD card to get
-
Thinking about getting a retro pie to try and emulate some of my favorite games from childhood. I want to mainly focus on NES and Genesis titles but I have a rather dumb question.
Being that the rocks in my backyard are more tech savvy than I am, I see various recommendations for SD card size. I can't imagine needing more than 50 games in total, does a bigger card really make much of a difference, or brand?
I seem to get more lost the more I read trying to figure out how to do this lol.
-
@ruthless4u Really depends on what you want. If you really only want NES and Genesis i would say a 16 GB card is more then enough, especially when you think you don't need more then 50 games. On the other hand, if you decide later on to get more systems/roms or use video previews, this quickly becomes to small. In terms of performance it doesn't matter if you get a 8 GB card or a 128 GB, for performance the only thing that matters is (sequential) read/write speeds. But i wouldn't worry to much about that either, a class 10 card should be fine.
-
It depend on what systems you want to emulate.
Some systems (segacd, playstation) use discs which can hold up to 740 MB of data.
For example I have 40 psx games on my 32GB SD Card and it's nearly full.
-
@ruthless4u I have just a 4GB (!!) card for system only.
The roms itself are on a USB storage device with 32GB.
Why? 4GB is better for backup the system ;) -
NES games are measured in KB, while SNES and MD/Gen games average around 3-4 MB each. If you expect to have only around 50 games, then 8 or 16 GB is more than enough.
Personally though, I would recommend a 32 GB or 64 GB card to give yourself more wiggle room for other systems. The Pi 3 is capable of running emulators for a very wide number of systems, and PSX and Sega CD games are 700 MB on average, sometimes as much as 1 GB if you have multiple discs.
-
@ruthless4u 32gb is the sweet spot for most people. They are about $10 so you can't get much cheaper than that. 32gb should give you enough room to store just about every cartridge based game for every system ever made (minus NDS). If you plan on adding disc based games like PSX, Dreamcast, turbocd, segacd etc you might want to consider 64gb or larger.
-
@cyperghost I'm curious to know about the impact on performances when you have your games on an external USB storage device or on another storage accessed by the network, especially when running resource heavy emulators like the PSX emulator.
-
@a12c4 Well PSX was a single speed device = 600kB/s
So I think there is no impact in any case ... I think you will have slowdown with lots of metadata loading (Scraper Art and Videos) -
@a12c4 I've got my ps1 collection stored on a 128 gb flash drive..no issues whatsoever.
A list of all the advantages of using a flash drive for your roms:
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-driveI especially like how I can simply plug the flash drive in my pc and backup my saves / add or remove games.
-
@bobharris Interesting, those are fair points, even if I don't care much about losing my saves and settings with a corrupted sd card.
My biggest fear atm is running out of usb slots and having to use one of this "usb multiplicator" just for this.
One is took by the wire of my controller, one by the censor of my wireless keyboard, one by an usb stick.
I didn't had time yet to check out how to connect my controller using bluetooth but I heard some people had troubles with embedded bluetooth and had to add an external bluetooth dongle, which would use another extra usb slot.
-
@a12c4 said in How do I know what size SD card to get:
had to add an external bluetooth dongle, which would use another extra usb slot.
If you go via Bluetooth, you'll not be needing the USB controller port, plus you'll be able to use more than one controller wirelessly. But we kind of drifted from the poster's intentions here. For the games desired, a normal 32 Gb card would be enough.
-
@mitu I will still need it to recharge my controller.
EDIT : regarding this topic. Well, just clic on the tag "SD CARD" right under last message and you will get 50 other topics asking the exact same question with the exact same answers.
-
the size of the card you'll need is entirely dependent on the systems you wanna emulate.
'older' system, (nes, snes, genesis, basically anything 'older' than dreamcast and ps1) won't take much space. its when you wanna emulate 'newer' systems, that the file sizes increase dramatically.
For example, the entire nes library should only take up about 80 - 100 mbs, whlie a single ps1 game can take anywhere from 400mb to a gig. PSP and Dreamcast games (which run marginally well on an un-clocked pi 3 b) take up the most space. dreamcast games take AT LEAST 700mb per game (regardless of what game you choose).
as such, the size of the sd card you'll need is dependent on what systems you wanna run. If you're trying to run just basic games, then I'd suggest you get AT LEAST 16gb, and most likely wanna get 32gb. Personally I use a 64gb card, and with that, i can get every freaking game i would want to play, (dos games, dreamcast, ps's etc.)
please note that, the SD CARD will need to be formatted into a FAT32 partition. Most operating systems will NOT allow you to format an sd card bigger than 32gb into FAT32 natively. You'll have to download a third party program to format an SD card bigger than 32gb into FAT32.
As such, it would seem the recommendation for you is to get a 32gb sd card. this way, you'll definitely fit all the 'old school classics' and will not have trouble formatting the card into fat32.
hope that helps.
-Pete
-
@sublim21 just a side note but Dreamcast .gdi ROMs can be converted to .chd and they take up a lot less space.
-
hmmm. i did not know that. i'll have to check that out. i thought gdi and chd take the same space. its a little insane that ikaruga is a 15mb download, but 700mb when extracted.
-
@sublim21 yea I converted my copy of that game to chd. I'll check how big it is an report back.
-
that'd be awesome of ya. I use a chromebook so running windows exe's is a huge problem for me. I do have ubuntu running through a crouton, so it is possible to run the chd convertor through wine in ubuntu, but its gonna be a pain.
So knowing the actual size savings in converting would really help me out, cause it'd dictate whether or not i should bother with the hassle of converting the files.
-
@sublim21 it's 71mb when converted to chd. You don't have access to a windows computer to use chdman?
-
wow. 71mb, thats quite a savings. totally worth the hassle. i'll have to get working on that tonight.
ummm, i might be able to use my brothers machine, but he's very finicky with his electronics, so i'll probably try using wine in ubuntu first.
Thanks for reporting back and for letting me know about this 'chd' thing. it'll free a bunch of space on my machine, making me squeeze a few more games on the machine. its really appreciated.
-
@sublim21 if you haven't converted Dreamcast gdi to chd before make sure you use the right chdman converter. Has to be version 4 I believe. The latest version will not work.
Contributions to the project are always appreciated, so if you would like to support us with a donation you can do so here.
Hosting provided by Mythic-Beasts. See the Hosting Information page for more information.