Use of external hard-drives (exFAT) for SAMBA share and rom-storage?

ujellyx

Hey there,
first time raspberry pi (3) owner and new to all of it.

Not yet decided on what OS i wanna use (Decalbox/Retropie), so i have a few questions:

I currently have two external hard drives, exFAT formatted, with all my media on it and want to use them with my rpi. I want to access the hard drives from other computers via SAMBA share, use them remotely for my Plex Media Server on my PC and i’d like to store ROMs on one of them aswell – will this be possible with Retropie? If so, how and where do i start?

wetriner

In smb.conf in /etc/samba, there's a section at the bottom with all your shared directories. For example:

[configs]
comment = configs
path = "/opt/retropie/configs"
writeable = yes
guest ok = yes
create mask = 0644
directory mask = 0755
force user = pi

All you should really have to do is follow this as a template and change the path, comment, and name. Your usb external hard drive probably gets mounted to /media/usb, although there's probably a by-id directory that you could use in case of wanting to distinguish between two or more drives.

You can store roms on it of course. The question would be really how you would want to implement the ability to use them. You could mount your usb drive straight into your roms directory, so it would just override everything on the sd if plugged in. You could also create a symbolic link to a subdirectory in each of your rom folders, so your hard drive roms would show up as a directory within each system's gamelist. Or you could make a copy of each of the systems you want in es_systems.cfg and have those point to something like /media/usb/snes.

ujellyx

@wetriner said in Use of external hard-drives (exFAT) for SAMBA share and rom-storage?:

In smb.conf in /etc/samba, there's a section at the bottom with all your shared directories. For example:
[configs]
comment = configs
path = "/opt/retropie/configs"
writeable = yes
guest ok = yes
create mask = 0644
directory mask = 0755
force user = pi
All you should really have to do is follow this as a template and change the path, comment, and name. Your usb external hard drive probably gets mounted to /media/usb, although there's probably a by-id directory that you could use in case of wanting to distinguish between two or more drives.

You can store roms on it of course. The question would be really how you would want to implement the ability to use them. You could mount your usb drive straight into your roms directory, so it would just override everything on the sd if plugged in. You could also create a symbolic link to a subdirectory in each of your rom folders, so your hard drive roms would show up as a directory within each system's gamelist. Or you could make a copy of each of the systems you want in es_systems.cfg and have those point to something like /media/usb/snes.

so the exFAT format isn't problematic after all?