Moving to SSD - What are the Tangible Benefits?

George Spiggott

In the next couple of months I think I will have a spare 240 GB SATA SSD. I'm tempted to rebuild my Pi4 with it. Before I embark on this what are the measurable benefits of doing so over micro SD? Long term it will help with storage since by 128GB micro SD is getting fuller (but not yet full).

I know it is faster but is there likely to be a significant noticeable difference, especially for emulation of systems with smaller storage capacity (usually older cartridge based ones)? The only system I currently encounter any kind of load times on are PSP games (e.g. Tomb Raider Anniversary) and floppy emulation .ADF Amiga games (I feel that this is certainly not a limitation of the micro SD).

When some emulators load are they in fact accurately emulating the original hardware speeds or are all such loading times open ended in terms of how fast they can be and it is the current hardware that is the limitation?

Is there merit to keeping older system on Micro SD and saving the faster SSD space for tasks that can benefit from the extra speed?

SgtJimmyRustles

@George-Spiggott said in Moving to SSD - What are the Tangible Benefits?:

In the next couple of months I think I will have a spare 240 GB SATA SSD. I'm tempted to rebuild my Pi4 with it. Before I embark on this what are the measurable benefits of doing so over micro SD? Long term it will help with storage since by 128GB micro SD is getting fuller (but not yet full).
I know it is faster but is there likely to be a significant noticeable difference, especially for emulation of systems with smaller storage capacity (usually older cartridge based ones)? The only system I currently encounter any kind of load times on are PSP games (e.g. Tomb Raider Anniversary) and floppy emulation .ADF Amiga games (I feel that this is certainly not a limitation of the micro SD).
When some emulators load are they in fact accurately emulating the original hardware speeds or are all such loading times open ended in terms of how fast they can be and it is the current hardware that is the limitation?

I mean, stuff if you do it right, should load faster. You also get more storage space. But you have to do several updates to the eeprom I believe to get it to work.

Clyde

Why not combine the best of both worlds? Boot from a reasonably fast SD card and mount your rom folders from a large, fast SSD. I'm doing it like this for years on my Pi 3B and now 4B and didn't regret it for one second.

It even made rom transfers and backups much easier by connecting the rom drive to my Linux PC, before I switched from WLAN to GBit LAN, which made the speed advantage of USB for those purposes negligible.

The only drawback that I see is one more occupied USB port.

SgtJimmyRustles

@Clyde I've been having permission problems where the retropie mount folder and subfolders will get permissions changed to root. I think I mentioned it in another help thread that you were in.

George Spiggott

@Clyde said in Moving to SSD - What are the Tangible Benefits?:

Why not combine the best of both worlds?

That is very much my thinking. I suspect that most, if not all of the cartridge based systems have slower access times than a modern SD card and therefore any increase in loading times would be undetectable or negligible at best.

I'd be keen to hear any real life, rather than theoretical, speed increases that people have detected. I suspect this would be limited to read speeds as write speeds may have bottlenecks in other areas, such as WI-FI, and are not as commonly needed.

dankcushions

have you ever waited for your pi4 to load a game when using a SD card (ignoring, in-game loading, which may be slow as per the real system)? no, me neither!

George Spiggott

@dankcushions That's very much my point. I mention two examples in the OP.

Clyde

@SgtJimmyRustles said in Moving to SSD - What are the Tangible Benefits?:

@Clyde I've been having permission problems where the retropie mount folder and subfolders will get permissions changed to root. I think I mentioned it in another help thread that you were in.

I think you mean this one. I personally would rather try to fix this rather unusual problem than to mess with the eeprom. If you don't need to read the ssd from Windows or Mac, you also could format it with ext4 to get full Linux file permissions support on the drive, just like on the system sd card.

That said, I don't want to push you to anything, but only show some alternative routes. 😇

A Former User

@george-spiggott it depends what we're comparing, but realistically I wouldn't see why there would be much of an improvement between the 2 on the Pi performance wise, because the architecture just isn't there to take full advantage of the SSD's max speeds unless you use USB 3.0 external ones.

also high endurance SD cards exist which were intended for dashcam and security camera systems, life expectancy on a Raspberry Pi using these SD cards shouldn't be a problem for many years if all you're doing is emulating old games on them which will result in fewer rewrites per day.

The only big tangible improvement that would come from using an SSD is capacity. Geekworm sells a case that lets you install an internal one using expansion boards, there isn't anything wrong with trying it, but it's probably a waste of time if all you're using it for is emulating retro games.