MiSTer FPGA Forum

To save other readers time from reading the WHOLE post, I'll start with the main question first:
If switching to ethernet and NAS for MiSTer, assuming you still need an SD card in the DE10 for boot files (and a redirect to external drive), what is the suggested SD card size? Will an 8GB be enough or is there any core or thing that still needs to be on SD such as ExoDos or Linux based ScummVM, etc?

The reason being, for dual-owners of MiSTer and MiST [or MiSTica]:

My MiST has been lonely due to the added features of MiSTer, most notably auto-update script. I've had 4 to 6 smaller capacity SD cards divided into CONSOLES, an AMIGA one, ST, and some computer ones that had special formatting needs like FAT16. Any 'Evercade' style of swapping SD cards like they were system 'cartridges' got old for me. I bought a 512GB card for MiSTer that's reached it's limit. The largest collections on MiST would be TG16 CD games (about 155GB for me) and then my Amiga/ST/ZX Spectrum collections. I'll save room with MiST not currently compatible with ScummVM, GBA, Mega-CD and some others so I won't come close to filling the 512GB, but don't need to buy another 200-to-400GB card.

I have a nice dedicated PC VGA monitor for MiST I can use and can save MiSTer for dual HDMI [flat screen] and CRT tv in the main room. I'll ditch using any cores on MiST that still need it's own FAT16 card [if any] in favor of MiSTer, and look into updates that might streamline any ability to use my Mister collections (HDD images etc) instead of my strange file/folder structures on my old cards.

I need to experiment, but an idea to get Arcade cores up and running on MiST with less hassle is to run the update_all script in MiSTer, and copy the latest related .mra arcade files to use with MiST arcade files.

I don't have a MiST, but on the MiSTer, I've moved BIOS, Cheats, config, docs, games, saves, and savestates to the SMB share, while everything else (MRAs, rbfs, and all the various filters and scripts and things) are on the SD. Looking at it right now, the SD is at 3.1G, while the SMB share is at 134G.

As far as I can see, even the base 8G card that comes with the DE-10 would work for the foreseeable future with a similar setup. There'd be enough room for the current implementation and overhead files to more than double. That might someday happen, but it's probably years away. And I think I could add giant ROM libraries to the SMB share without affecting the SD; I would expect it to work flawlessly and take 3.1G with a terabyte of data on the share.

How that directly affects the MiST, I don't actually know, but I can certainly hypothesize that a network share should mean you can get away with a teeny SD card. There'd be no need for a second.