Largest size micro sd card?

kabal82

So I'm in the process of buying the needed parts to build a retropie console. I wondering what is the largest micro sd card that can be used? As I've seen several contradicting statements about 32 gb being the largest that can be formatted for RasberryPi.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, as I believe I may need more than 32 gb for the amount of intended ROMs I plan on installing onto the system.

Thanks.

Charco

@kabal82 I am using a 64gb class 10 microsd card and it works fine.

Finhead

@kabal82 Personally if I were going to use that many roms tot ake that much space , which I could only see if I was going to run PSX games. I would use a USB drive and store your roms on that since they are cheaper and far less likely to currupt. Just throwing another option out there.

Rion

@Finhead said in Largest size micro sd card?:

@kabal82 Personally if I were going to use that many roms tot ake that much space , which I could only see if I was going to run PSX games. I would use a USB drive and store your roms on that since they are cheaper and far less likely to currupt. Just throwing another option out there.

I'm going with @Finhead on this one.
Buy a good SD card.

For example Samsung Pro 16GB
More into on why here

Go for a large & fast USB Pen Drive from a reputable manufacturer, Sandisk for example. Preferable USB 3.0

Load Retropie from the SD card and the rest from USB.

Drokkeh

I am using a 64gb sandisk ultra class 10. Works great

kabal82

@Rion

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm new to this and wasn't aware this was a possibility. All the videos I've seen about how to set-up retropie, I was under the impression that Retropie automatically copies ROMs over from a USB thumb drive to the micro SD card after everything is setup. I didn't think it was a possibility to load and play the ROM's from the USB drive.

Rion

@kabal82 said in Largest size micro sd card?:

@Rion

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm new to this and wasn't aware this was a possibility. All the videos I've seen about how to set-up retropie, I was under the impression that Retropie automatically copies ROMs over from a USB thumb drive to the micro SD card after everything is setup. I didn't think it was a possibility to load and play the ROM's from the USB drive.

That is partly true. But that's only if you have USB ROM service enabled.

What I have done is to mount the USB flashdrive permanently to a folder in /media and point to that location in es. More info here

chavatar

@kabal82
Hi. There shouldn't be a problem with cards larger than 32GB, but those "contradicting statements" arise from larger cards being a newer specification that not all devices understand ( wikipedia ). (Not sure about the Pi specifically though)

You can look at http://elinux.org/RPi_SD_cards for, I think, the most authoritative list of tested cards.

As mentioned by others above, it's quite easy, cheaper (per GB) and often more convenient to house roms on external storage (usb stick, portable disk) and reference them from /home/pi/.emulationstation/es_systems.cfg by altering the rom paths.

As far as I know RetroPie automounts usb storage and if you only have one device in, it can be referenced by /media/usb/ . (It numbers them if you have more than one). So my psx roms are on /media/usb/roms/psx .

You can enable the USB rom service, plug in a stick (with "retropie" folder in root) to create a nice folder structure for you automatically, then disable it when you've populated it with gaming goodness (otherwise it will try to copy everything over to your card).

Cheers

cparker74

I have a 1tb hdd specifically for my pi3

InsecureSpike

yup I'd strongly suggest too, with @finhead & @Rion,
have RetroPie on your SD card, "Kingston 4gb - 8gb, would be good enough, make sure it's class 10, I use these and I've never had issues. and a good quality USB drive,
the reason we suggest this is so if your SD card corrupts or you edit something on your RetroPie, and basically it fucks up, you have your precious collection of roms safely upon your USB drive, and you will only have to set up your new/replacement SD card.
believe me, I learnt the hard way, many many versions ago.

there are no right or wrong ways of this particular issue, but personally I'd strongly suggest the roms on USB route

mediamogul

There are three pieces of additional information that might come in handy if you use the highly recommended link provided by Rion. First, symbolic linking an external rom folder to where the system already expects to find it (/home/pi/RetroPie/roms) can save you a lot of work in the future due to the es config constantly being rewritten whenever an update is done, or an emulator is added. Also, if you plan to auto-mount a fat32 drive, make sure you add the "vfat" variable to your fstab. At the same time it's important to remember that .sh launch scripts won't function on a fat32 drive unless you add the "exec" variable as well.

So by the example given in that link, you would change:

UUID=18A9-9943 /media/usb auto,users,rw,uid=pi,gid=pi 0 0

to

UUID=18A9-9943 /media/usb vfat auto,users,rw,exec,uid=pi,gid=pi 0 0

Again, other than the symbolic linking, these additions are only if you plan to run your roms folder from an external fat32 formatted USB drive.

BenWlson

@mediamogul what if you plan to use a NTFS formatted external HDD? maybe something like the 314GB WD PiDrive?

mediamogul

@BenWlson

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you'll need to replace "vfat" from my example with "ntfs". According to that particular guide, you might also need to install:

sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

As far as the exec command for .sh scripts, I don't really know. Just keep in mind that if you can't launch one of the Apple or Amiga emulators, then you will most likely need to add it as you would with fat32.

InsecureSpike

maybe try ext4 it has a faster transfere rate. and is better suited for usage on rpi

chavatar

On 2nd thoughts, go with mediamogul et al.'s advice and ignore me :)

I hadn't realised you can't run .sh scripts directly from some file systems. Is that why you explicitly need to mount the drive rather than let it automount? Mediamogul suggests this step may not be necessary for a non FAT32 drive (but I can see it would be easier to explicitly mount if not sure). Hoping someone will say if that's right/wrong, so I understand the issue.

As a sidenote to es_systems.cfg alterations - the config I see is from /home/pi/.emulationstation/es_systems.cfg

This seems to be different from /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg - in my case? This latter one gets updated, while "my one" stays the same. I've been updating it manually - which suits me as mine is somewhat customised. So I haven't realy looked into it, but any thoughts would be appreciated (unless I'm OT ;)).

mediamogul

@InsecureSpike said in Largest size micro sd card?:

is better suited for usage on rpi

Very true. It's also the path of least resistance. Auto-mount an external ext4 formatted drive, then symlink a roms folder and RetoPie will never know the difference.

Some Pros & cons of the ones mentioned so far:

ext4
Pros: Fast transfer rate. No additional considerations or setup past the mounting process.
Cons: Limited mostly to the Linux ecosystem, prohibiting general use in Mac/Win.

fat32
Pros: Highest compatibility between platforms. Great for sharing between most systems.
Cons: 4GB limit on file sizes. Considerations must be made in setup to allow full compatibility with RetroPie.

ntfs
Pros: Excellent compatibility with Windows. Fast transfer rate.
Cons: Considerations must be made in setup to allow full compatibility with RetroPie.

InsecureSpike

/opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation

mediamogul

@chavatar said in Largest size micro sd card?:

I hadn't realised you can't run .sh scripts directly from some file systems. Is that why you explicitly need to mount the drive rather than let it automount?

Auto-mounting will work, you just need to tell the system how to auto-mount it so as to gain the maximum level of compatibilty. The one thing it still will not allow is putting a symlink on the mounted fat32 drive. eDuke32 for example, tries to use a symlink in launching from it's "emulators.cfg" ES menu script. This can be fixed by altering the script to call out to the actual folder it needs (-j/opt/retropie/ports/eduke32/shareware) rather than the symlink that does not exist because it couldn't be created.

...seems to be different from /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg ...I haven't realy looked into it, but any thoughts would be appreciated

I was under the impression that one was a symlink of the other, but if you are customizing it without being affected by updates, then I guess they're different. That's interesting. I'll check it out tomorrow. Hah, or later today I guess. Although I've always subscribed to the notion that "the night belongs to the day before".

chavatar

@mediamogul - much appreciated :)

I was under the impression that one was a symlink of the other

So was I, and I'm sure mine's odd in some way, but good to check.

"the night belongs to the day before"

Yang-yin baby! :)

InsecureSpike

@mediamogul said in Largest size micro sd card?:

@chavatar said in Largest size micro sd card?:

I hadn't realised you can't run .sh scripts directly from some file systems. Is that why you explicitly need to mount the drive rather than let it automount?

Auto-mounting will work, you just need to tell the system how to auto-mount it so as to gain the maximum level of compatibilty. The one thing it still will not allow is putting a symlink on the mounted fat32 drive. eDuke32 for example, tries to use a symlink in launching from it's "emulators.cfg" ES menu script. This can be fixed by altering the script to call out to the actual folder it needs (-j/opt/retropie/ports/eduke32/shareware) rather than the symlink that does not exist because it couldn't be created.

...seems to be different from /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg ...I haven't realy looked into it, but any thoughts would be appreciated

I was under the impression that one was a symlink of the other, but if you are customizing it without being affected by updates, then I guess they're different. That's interesting. I'll check it out tomorrow. Hah, or later today I guess. Although I've always subscribed to the notion that "the night belongs to the day before".

@chavatar said in Largest size micro sd card?:

@mediamogul - much appreciated :)

I was under the impression that one was a symlink of the other

So was I, and I'm sure mine's odd in some way, but good to check.

"the night belongs to the day before"

Yang-yin baby! :)

the new location for custom es_systems.cfg etc

/opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation

the original is still at

/etc/emulationstation