Mounting larger roms using smb/nfs performance

Question

I have a retropie set up attached to my TV, which I use for both streaming (kodi) and light gaming, as of recent. I'm still setting the whole thing up a the time. Since SNES and GBA roms aren't that big, storage space isn't an issue on my 16GB SD card. However PSX games tend to be bigger.

I was wondering if I could mount my NTFS mounted smb drive (on a pi 1 B+ somewhere else in the house) in the psx roms directory, or would the 1-2MB/s throughput be too slow to run roms larger than a few MB's?

*note throughput is in Mega Byte per second not Mega Bit)

As a side question: can the rom dir of any emulator contain subdirectories or will emulationstation skip subdirectories? This could help with mounting larger images in a "smb" subdir for instance.

Answer 1

Ok so I got home and tried this for myself.

results:

• Subdirs work and are recognised
• smb mount works and is recognised
• games start from mount
• Slight lags and choppyness from time to time

this was tested with CTR crash team racing rom (PSX)

EDIT: Similar results with NFS both have about the same transfer speed of max 5MB/s "download" to the retropie

EDIT2: No issues with "Metal Gear" and "Tony Hawk 2"

Monitoring the Traffic shows Burst of download Traffic about 250 to 500 KB/s and not much load on CPU or memory for the latter 2... So I guess the lags are chalked up to the emulator ...