Size of SDcard in SD & HDD combo?

m2306

I’m setting up a retrogaming system with rPi3B+. I’m going to add lots of roms so I thought I would get a USB HDD for the games. I will not add N64 or PSX but as much as possible from older systems. What size SD card do I need if all the roms are on the HD, will I still need lots of space on the SD card for artwork etc? I also read somwhere that the OS could be put on the HDD. How have you guys been setting things up, what would be the best way to do this? Also, I understand the HDD should have its own power supply, as opposed to drawing power from the USB via th Pi, correct? Thnx!

mitu

@m2306 Hard to appreciate the size, since you didn't say which systems you intend to use, but for anything older than the SNES generation, the artwork will take more space than the games, in most cases.
Look up the sizes for the complete romsets for each system you want to add, so you'll know how much space the games will be, then add ~350KB per ROM for artwork (that's without video). You can store the artwork on the disk also, in the ROM folders, so you can use a small SD card for the OS and have everything else on the external disk.
The RPI3 can boot from USB (not sure if the 3B+ can do that out-of-the box), but you'll have to manually configure it and install the OS separately, since the RetroPie image doesn't support USB installation. And yes, the bigger the HDD, the more power you'll need for it, so a separate power supply for the disk should be added.

ClassicGMR

@m2306 I have a 128GB USB stick and it's at 99GB used / 21GB free.

I have scraped everything using the built-in scraper then I used Sselph's scraper after that so I have game info, videos and screenshots saved. To @mitu 's point I am using a lot more space for videos than games in a lot of system folders. Hell... the entire Atari 2600 library is somewhere close to 5 MB... the videos and data take up 500 MB.

I have:
MAME 0.78 (43.1 GB)
Atari 2600 (517 MB)
Atari 7800 (176 MB)
Atari Lynx (382 MB)
GBA (8.21 GB)
Intellivision (2.33 MB - not scraped yet)
Sega Master System (664 MB)
Sega Genesis (7.16 GB)
Nintendo (2.39 GB)
Super Nintendo (4.49 GB)
Nintendo Virtual Boy (76.6 MB)
Neo Geo Pocket Color (227 MB)
Turbo Grafx-16 (1.40 GB)
PC Ports (110 MB)
Playstation 1 (27.1 GB)
Playstation Portable (1.84 GB)
Vectrex (40 MB)

I still intend to add the Sega Game Gear, Gameboy, Gameboy Color and Atari 5200. I'll have room for all of that.

I have a 256GB USB stick as well with the same files so obviously that's not even 1/2 full! That one will start getting the N64, PSP and Dreamcast games that run well and more of the Playstation 1 library.

For my $0.02 I don't see myself ever needing more than the 256GB stick and it takes very little power to run. It's the only thing plugged into the USB with a 3A power supply so no issues there either.

ChuckyP

I use a 64 GIG SD card with a 2TB USB hard drive attached. The hard drive simply holds my disc based systems and MS Dos, the rest (select N64 games down to Atari2600) and all videos and artwork fit on the SD Card.

m2306

Thanks for the replies. I’ll see what compatible cards I can find and then add a HDD too. Are there compatibility issues with the HDDs as well? What about problems with the SD card, corruption and so on? I’m getting the Control block so I’ll have a dedicated on off switch. But still worried about potential problems with card corruption and not having a proper reset button.

steptoe

You can set-up RetroPie to basically run from your external USB hard drive, so as little strain as possible is put on the SD card or even set it up to run everything off your hard drive

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Create-a-RetroPie-USB-Boot-Drive-for-Raspbe/

I use a 1TB portable USB hard drive connected to the PI3 thats overclocked as much as I can get it and still be stable, but with a big heatsink stuck on the CPU with heatsink glue with tiny cooling fan and temps never get much about 45c

1TB is probably too much, maybe even 500GB at a push but the price difference between them is small unless your finances are really stretched 1TB is suggested leaving plenty of room for images and videos

For artwork and play videos, I gave this a try and it pretty much set everything up for me, but does need a Windows OS to run with GUI. It took some head scratching and playing around with configs to get what I wanted set-up but once set-up its a case of click and run and leave overnight to scan all the ROMs and download everything, even artwork and videos that other scrapers miss

https://www.skraper.net/

Apparently it can scan RetroPie directly via Samba share but I couldn't get that to work, so had to basically copy over the entire ROM folder to my desktop, then scan the ROMs, then copy all the artwork and configs back over to the PI installation. A bit of a chore but it worked first time. All folders and configs were where they should be and more importantly all videos worked as they should

I had tried attract mode but never got it to work, this worked as I use OSMC KODI and RetroPie installed using RetroSMC and looking for solutions and found this scraper that solved all my problems with attract mode

Roken

Just use the sdcard for /boot and mount rootfs entirely on the hd. Not only will it give you much more storage, but it will also almost eliminate the sdcard failure.

See steptoe's post.

I have 3 Pis, all mounting rootfs on real HDs (one over NFS, and two local), and apart from kernel upgrades, there are no writes to the sdcard (well, except when I play with cmdline.txt and config.txt - but that's just me)