Slow writing to external HDD

pamput

Hello,

Since I've installed an external hdd following this guide my life has improved significantly: more space, more games, more fun! Just one thing bothers me, whenever I do a savestate it takes AGES. A snes savestate takes 20s, a psx savestate takes roughly a minute! In comparison when I was using the micro sd the amount of time was 1/10th. What am I doing wrong?

I'm running everything off a 3B+ with a 1T hdd formatted in fat32. I tried this same configuration off two different pis and two different external hdd with the same issue.

Any help would be appreciated.

mitu

Can you reproduce this 'slow write' manually - i.e. copying ROMs over the network or just from the CLI ? How is the HDD powered - does it draw power from the Pi or has it's own power source ? Please add more info as requested in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first.

pamput

@mitu said in Slow writing to external HDD:

copying ROMs over the network

Yes and no. The copy over the network is quite slow (roughly 200KBps), but not as slow. But if it's a power issue, it might still make kind of sense, since when I copy stuff over usually I'm not playing. Still, the difference in speed even here is really drastic (a snes savestate is just a couple of megs, and it still takes 20ish seconds).

does it draw power from the Pi or has it's own power source

From the PI, I assumed since I was using the original Pi charger the board would be able to provide enough juice, I'll try with an external powered one and let you know.

pamput

It's been a long time, but I finally figured what the issue was (sorry for the necro, but it may be useful to others).

In my case it wasn't a problem of power to the HDD. I had video_threaded turned off.
To fix this go to the the Retroarch options, go to video and turn this back ON.

Solved.

VictimRLSH

@pamput What exactly does that do? Will it increase speed of data throughput for other devices? I frequently plug large USB drives into my Pi and transfer to the 256gb SD card. The Pi 4 is much snappier about this but the 3 B not so much.

mitu

@VictimRLSH video_threaded is a RetroArch setting, it only affects the emulation, doesn't have any impact on USB connected devices (see https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Input-Lag/#video_threaded). It's set to on on RPI systems by RetroPie, so I don't know why for @pamput it wasn't set (3rd party image ?).

VictimRLSH

After finding out what that does I can see why it was slowing down things, the CPU was doing ALL the work...

pamput

@mitu said in Slow writing to external HDD:

I don't know why for @pamput it wasn't set (3rd party image ?).

Nah, I probably just fiddle with it and didn't set it back to ON.