How To Use A USB For Roms?

SeTzX

This is a kind of long post, but if you want to skip all the misc. And background stuff, please just scroll down to the "questions"

BACKGROUND:
Hey everyone! I am somewhat new to raspberry pi and retropie. I have little coding experience and have never used linux until this. I have been toying around and watching videos on it pretty much nonstop the past 2 days and have managed to get it up and running with all of the basics and stuff to start with and build on.
I even went into F4 and was able to fix a crashing problem and reset my theme from the command line!

TL;DR: I am new to everything involved in this but am learning and managed to get my pi setup.

Now, i finally figured out how to get PSX games on (you need a .bin and a .cue) and they (being large files) have instantly been filling up the sd card, I forsee needing a much larger storage option very soon and that is the point of this post.

TL;DR: I need a bigger storage option for my roms.

My method I have been using for adding games to the pi is to put them on a usb stick in the rom folder (using my macbook) and when I remove it from my laptop and put the USB stick in the pi, it blinks and everything automatically transfers to the micro SD card.

Both the Micro SD card and the Flashdrive are 16GB.

 MAIN POINT:

I believe that the best option for me (for both reliability and more space) would be to store the roms on a seperate USB stick (instead of the micro SD card) I put in the raspberry pi.

THIS: is the guide i am going to follow. Can you confirm it is accurate?
http://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2014/05/how-to-mount-a-usb-flash-disk-on-the-raspberry-pi/

HERE ARE MY QUESTIONS:

1). If you have thousands upon thousands of roms, will it eventually start making your system slow down or affect performance?

2). What size/brand flash drive is good? I found a list of compatible drives before but seem to have lost it somewhere. A link would be good. Larger storage is better.

3).What is(IF there is) the higest capacity you can have on a USB for roms before it becomes unreliable.

4). How can i easily back up the system incase i mess something up in the future? (so i can easily reinstall and restore everything)

5). How can I transfer the roms that I already have on the SD card to the USB stick? I want to keep everything uniform and not have some roms one place and some in another, I find that inefficient and confusing.

6). Once all of the roms are on the USB stick, what happens if I remove the USB stick from the pi? Will it crash or damage anything?

7). I explained my method for getting roms on the pi above. If I get all my roms on a USB stick, can i just remove it from the pi, put it in my laptop, add roms, and put it back in the pi? (like i am currently doing)? Or would i now have to use a different method for adding roms?

8). Please let me know if this is right: from what I understand, the OS will be on the micro SD card and all the games will be on the USB stick. So in theory, could i reset the micro SD card or reinstall retropie (if i end up messing something up in the future) and when it is reinstalled, still have it recognize all my roms from the old USB stick if i insert it into the new install of retropie?

Thank you guys so much for the support, this project and the forum has opend up my world to computing and retro games so much. It means alot to a 17 year old.

Best Regards,
-Sebastian

dankcushions

i would use our guide instead (which is pretty similar, but has some crucial extras) - https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive