PC with Dual Internal Storage

cowboysmall

Hi all,

I recently purchased a Dell Inspiron 3470 Mini with the intention of putting Lakka or Batocera on it - for my emulation needs. It has dual storage - a 128GB M2 SATA SSD and a 1TB HDD. What I would like to know is what is the best way to set up or configure Batocera so that the roms are on the HDD and everything else is on the SSD?

It seems this is pretty easy to set up for a network share:

https://batocera-linux.xorhub.com/wiki/doku.php?id=en:store_games_on_a_nas

but I can't see a way to do this for a second internal hard drive apart from editing fstab.

Thanks in advance,

J.K.

nadenislamarre

you chooose menu>system>external storage and you choose your disk.
however, i don't understand the reason to use 2 disks while only 2GB are required at the beginning of the disk for the system.

cowboysmall

The system comes with two disks - an SSD for the OS, and a HDD for data.

If I do what you suggest I have a wasted partition on the SSD.

i.e. the layout of disks is currently:
SSD - 2 GB system
SSD - 126GB share
HDD - unused.

I want to mount the full HDD on ~/roms like so:
SSD - 2 GB system
SSD - 126 GB share
HDD - 1 TB share/roms

Does this make sense? It's similar to mounting a NFS or SAMBA share on the roms directory, except it's a second internal hard drive, rather than a network share.

Thanks,

J.K.

nadenislamarre

no so much.
in 6 months, system will be 2GB, share less than 1GB.
the idea to separate share and roms on the nas is far from evidence.
it comes from the fact that i've a rpi, an odroid and a computer. while all shares the sames roms, share must be separated because default emulators are not the same on these board. (for the moment, there is also some other reasons that i'm removing for next versions). but even once cleaned, if you run snes on rpi1 (pocketsnes) save a state, then start the odroid (snes9x) and restore a state, it will crash. as a general rule, i'm not sure that even with common emulators, states can be shared among different archs.

cowboysmall

The case for a shared storage solution is valid, and requires no explanation - indeed it is a typical use case and justification for network shares, but I think you might be missing my point - I was only speaking analogously when I talked about network sharing.

My current setup is:

SSD: 2 GB system
SSD: 126 GB share
HDD: 1 TB unused

after doing what you suggest (which actually I tried after initial installation) I have the following:

SSD: 2 GB system
SSD: 126 GB unused
HDD: 1 TB share

I would prefer no unused, or wasted, partition. I want 'share' to remain on the 126 GB partition on the SSD, and I want to mount the 1 TB HDD on 'share/roms'. I can achieve this by manually editing fstab, but I wanted to know if it was possible to do this in a way analogous to mounting network shares.

Thanks,

J.K.

nadenislamarre

just remove the ssd and install all in hdd.
do you target this ?

SSD: 2 GB system
SSD: 2 GB share
HDD: 1 TB roms

ushilives

What abou just installing Batocera onto the HDD? Then when it loads up you have 2GB system then the rest of the HDD is then for ROMS.

draneb

Hello everyone and Happy New Year!

I found this forum page through a search. This is something I am also wanting to do. In my case, I want to dedicate an entire machine to Batocera. (I don’t like any other software out there including the one that starts with launch)

I bought a DeskMini with (2) m.2 SSDs and (2) 2.5″ WD drives. I spent a lot of money and when it came down to installing Batocera I couldn’t figure out how to get it to show all of the drives (perhaps it isn’t possible) so I ended up selling the parts on ebay and losing money.

I would be happy with installing Batocera on a small 256GB SSD I have here. and then having all the roms on a very large 3.5″ drive, say 10TB. That is my current plans since the DeskMini backfired. Just like with any OS, like Windows, I was always taught to keep the OS by itself and then all your data, music, software, etc on the D drive, that way if you ever have to reinstall Windows or the C drive fails you don’t lose everything. So I would like to apply the same thing to Batocera. Have all the system files separate from the roms. As many times as I personally have messed settings up and had to reinstall Batocera I definitely want the roms on a separate drive.

Both of the drives would be Internal. But according to the post above, I would select EXTERNAL for the 10TB drive where the roms are kept even though it is Internal? And everything should work fine?

I don’t have the 10TB drive yet as I wanted to make sure this time before I spent the money :)

How should the ROM drive be formatted? Will it recognize NTFS?

Thank you very much for your help!

Atari

draneb NTFS is not recommended, but it will still work. You can use Batocera to reformat it to ext4 or something, which works much better with wine etc.
And that’s right, you’d just set your external storage to that drive and all your userdata will be accessed from that larger drive instead.