What format for external HDD

[robmcc83]

Hi all,

purchased a 128gb sd card and im having a hard time copying files over the network to the pi 3 with recalbox 7.1.1

Smaller roms are fine but trying to copy over my psx and sega cd roms over the network is just causing crashes and hangups.

so ive decided to use a external hard drive i have spare for the roms and would just like to know what is the best way to format this for recalbox for example fat32, exfat, ext4 or ntfs.

Thanks in advance
Rob

[LonnySamson]

This post is deleted!

[RustyMG]

Hi,
All my usb sticks and 2.5" HDs are fat32, and I've never had a problem

[Alexandre M]

@robmcc83
Bonjour.
De mon coté avec mon NESPI CASE, j' ai un disque dur WD Blue en SATA 500 Go. Si je format en Fat32, j' ai systématiquement au démarrage lorsque je vais dans le menu un freeze du menu pendant 70 secondes. J' ai donc formaté mon disque dur en ExtFat et je n' ai plus de soucis.

[robmcc83]

@Alexandre-M said in What format for external HDD:

@robmcc83
Bonjour.
De mon coté avec mon NESPI CASE, j' ai un disque dur WD Blue en SATA 500 Go. Si je format en Fat32, j' ai systématiquement au démarrage lorsque je vais dans le menu un freeze du menu pendant 70 secondes. J' ai donc formaté mon disque dur en ExtFat et je n' ai plus de soucis.

My drive is also a wd blue and I have the snespi case so very similar setup im probably best to go with extfat then, will give it a try when I get a moment. Does the drive have to have a mbr or gpt partition table or does recalbox support both.

Thanks for your help

[Scavy]

@robmcc83 @RustyMG
Les supports externes (clé, DD) doivent être formater en exfat, et pas en fat32.

[RustyMG]

@robmcc83 @Scavy
Hi both,
Currently been using a Western Digital 2tb 2.5", a Samsung 1Tb 2.5", and an oooold 320gig ancient 2.5" on my Recalbox 6 and 7 installs for several years, all fat32 format, and all have never ever missed a beat or froze.
They are fat32 simply as that's the format they were in before I used them for my Retro gaming and I was too lazy to reformat them !

[robmcc83]

Well it turns out my original problem of roms failing to transfer over the network to the sd card may actually be caused by either a faulty sd card ao a fake!

I have tried to start from scratch and after cleaning the SanDisk 128gb sd card with sd formatter the card now only shows it has half the capacity as it should do, I've tried writing recalbox to the sd card which it does but really slow, I've then tried copying a file directly to my sd card whilst its plugged into my laptop and it only has a transfer speed of 1mb.

I got out my old trusty samsung 32gb sd card, replicated the above that I tried with the new card and transfer speed was around 30mb. Wow thats a massive difference.

So put the old card into my pi, tried transferring a few cd based roms and it worked absolutely fine.

So this thread is now solved as it is a sd card fault.

Thanks all

[Benzitor]

@robmcc83 for HDD or SSD format it in exfat format. Then setup recalbox to use external drives, and it will setup the structure.
The advantage of this is that you can upload all rooms, bios, configs, straight from windows.