Use of SSD on Pi3

Drakaen391

So looking to replace the SD card with something only to boot with, and have the entire OS and Roms ran off a Hard drive... need opinions if others have done it and what issues I could be looking at

Pro:
-read/write could go up as the SD card isn’t made to run an Operating system...
-More space as the hard drive I have is 256gb
-easy to handle coding offline

Con:
-takes up space, even though the pi box has plenty
-limited to USB2.0 speeds (both the sata adaptor and pi3)

mitu

If you want to replace the SD card entirely, then get an USB stick, a SSD would be overkill since the Pi doesn't have the necessary bus speed to take advantage of it. There's plenty of keychain sized USB sticks with the right size.

Drakaen391

@mitu my experience is usb flash drives don’t have a constant speed...

And I already have the old SSD and an old HDD...

martincrocenzi

@Drakaen391 can you give me a link or guide me through the steps to add a HDD to my raspberry? I've already got a 32 gb SD card running with retropie but I want to run it from a smaller micro SD and also add a 64 gb. old hdd I got into a case. Thanks in advance!

Drakaen391

@martincrocenzi

Right now it’s just a theory, I haven’t found any guide related to retropie, so I am planning to run some tests. To see if there is an improvement to read/write speeds... as I may also add a swap partition if things work right....

Clyde

@drakaen391 I had my arcade folder on a Samsung EVO 840 ssd from the start of my Retropie hobby in autumn 2017 and I recently moved all other rom folders to the ssd. I experienced no issues or slowdowns whatsoever. I only used the USB3 port of my pc to speed up the migration of the roms to the ssd.

edit: As for the process to do that, I did it manually like it's described in the docs, but with only the roms folder on the ssd instead of the whole Retropie folder and ext4 instead of vfat as the file system for the ssd, since I'm using Linux on all my machines and thus, don't need a Windows-readable file system on the ssd.

Drakaen391

@clyde from looking at various site, ext4 runs faster then windows based file system

Clyde

@drakaen391 That may well be, given that it's one of Linux' native file systems and has many modern optimisations. Also, it supports Linux' rights management, which vfat doesn't. That may not matter very often on a mere rom storage, but it's nice to have if it does at some point in the future. Finally, ext4 supports SSD features like TRIM, although that also may not matter much on a mostly static data storage.

Roken

I've been on a journey to get retropie rootfs booting from an NFS drive connected to (and served by) another Pi. Not quite there, yet - but oh so close.

You can see my journey at https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=212242.

Once I have it all running properly (it is, now, but not straight from a fresh boot) I'll provide proper documentation.