MiSTer FPGA Forum

I'm trying to find some documentation on the speed of the USB on this hub. What USB revision is it using? I'm generally curious because of the Sata hard drive adapter I recently purchased.

Thanks!

Assuming it has the FE2.1 controller it's USB2 so in theory 480Mbp/s (60MB/s).

The DE10 nano itself is the bottle neck here, with its usb 2.0. You’ll never get anything faster.

Thanks for your help. I guess the Sata enclosure I just purchased will be pretty slow. That’s ok atleast I can cheaply get some storage.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/154987031909

i'm using an external ssd with a usb3 storage adapter but the throughput and seek times are more than enough for the cores i believe.

The Ethernet port has more bandwidth than the USB ports do, so a network share can be the fastest overall option.

That would mean you would need to spin up and potentially keep an external device powered on 24/7 just to service the MiSTer with a high availability option for systems that didn't even need this?

To each his / her own i guess but to fire up a NAS just for this is not really efficient in my humble opinion, but if you've got one running already then it could be a option.

In short currently there's no system besides maybe the 486 core that could benefit from these higher potential speeds?

MostroW wrote: ↑Fri Jul 08, 2022 12:37 pm That would mean you would need to spin up and potentially keep an external device powered on 24/7 just to service the MiSTer with a high availability option for systems that didn't even need this?

That's the reason I eventually switched to an external hdd for the bigger collections (CDs and vhds). I did consider the Ethernet but that would mean maintaining another PC or some other thing, and it's just not worth it imo, though, as you say, if somebody already has one set up then of course it makes sense.

One thing to remember when going the hdd route is to make sure it's formatted in FAT32, otherwise the write speeds will be very slow.

using exFAT here, haven't really noticed anything out of the ordinary as of yet, but then again i'm not using Amiga or 486 core at this point so it might be an existing "non existant" problem for me. (weirdly phrased i'm aware. )

Yeah, read speeds were fine when I was on exFAT (or maybe it was NTFS), or at least the difference too small for me to notice. You can probably even use Amiga & ao486 with some existing collections too (like MegaAGS) and not be affected by this. I just like to install my own games, and the write speeds were unbearable for that.

Why would you want a hard drive, anyway? I put a 256 GB micro SD card in my Mister and it can fit a lot of stuff. It was really cheap, too. Even the 512 GB memory cards are quite reasonable.

I transfer all my stuff through the network, that way there's no plugging and unplugging the card.

If you look at the CD-media cores + ao486, the complete collections count in terabytes, and transferring big files over WiFi is rather slow. So if you want to try new CD games or move big vhds back and forth it's not ideal. To use Ethernet I'd have to have an extra machine running (my main PC is used for online work so I'm not fiddling with network on it) which would be overkill imo.

Hence HDD being the best solution for me. I bought 2 longer USB-HDD cables for this setup and now the HDD resides on my desk, so I just have to swap the plugs whenever I want to transfer big stuff.

adamchevy wrote: ↑Fri Jul 08, 2022 3:57 am Thanks for your help. I guess the Sata enclosure I just purchased will be pretty slow. That’s ok atleast I can cheaply get some storage.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/154987031909

Yes USB SATA is going to be slower than the MicroSD itself, and is as slow as WiFi to a CIFS share. The fastest speed is Ethernet to a CIFS share.

https://misteraddons.com/blogs/news/mis ... d-shootout

But yes, your situation may vary, ethernet isn't always the solution, and in general the slower read times won't really impact gameplay at all, typically.

MostroW wrote: ↑Fri Jul 08, 2022 12:37 pm That would mean you would need to spin up and potentially keep an external device powered on 24/7 just to service the MiSTer with a high availability option for systems that didn't even need this?

To each his / her own i guess but to fire up a NAS just for this is not really efficient in my humble opinion, but if you've got one running already then it could be a option.

In short currently there's no system besides maybe the 486 core that could benefit from these higher potential speeds?

I'm running a ZFS-based NAS anyway, so adding a share for the Mister just took a few minutes. The real reason I'm running it there is for the reliability, since SD cards are notoriously fragile. Speed is a nice secondary benefit, and then I'm also doing hourly/daily/weekly/monthly checkpointing on all the files, so that save files and save states end up with lots of automatic backups.

It's a pretty sweet setup. I really like ZFS. But you'd want a dedicated small computer and at least a pair of mirrored drives to do this, so particularly if you live where power is expensive, this might be a wildly unrealistic scenario, creating more problems than it solves.