Networked or Cloud Storage?

[mahuti]

Anyone here set up cloud services or network storage for hosting their roms/snaps/marquees, etc? I have 4 machines, I was thinking it would be nice to just be able to maintain everything in one spot (and I have KODI set up on my Retropie image, and it would be nice to be able to queue up music videos or 80's movies without eating up a huge amount of storage on each SD card. I'd rather buy one decent drive than a bunch of slow SD cards.

I looked on the net a bit, and I could see that people were doing it. I'll probably give it  a shot at some point. 

[UEDan]

I just used a low powered Mini ITX in a DIY case running Windows/Kodi. Doubles as my media PC.
3, 2.5" HDD drives
1 Main windows
2, 1TB drives in RAID 1 for the network share.
Gigabit Ethernet and 300mbps wifi is plenty for my home networking needs.

Unless the Pis are cabled in, load times may suffer a bit.

[mahuti]

So are you using that network share on the Pis then for something like emulation station or attract mode?

I'm guessing if they're started up from a script on power-up the content might not be available on the network fast enough for them. I'd guess they'd choke.

[vinegar]

once emulationstation has a games list, it'll go by the xml over the filesystem.  so even if the ROMs themselves aren't immediately available at launch, they should still show up in ES just fine.  just... not be launchable until they are available

edit: oh but if you want art, themes and such to also be on the network share - that you're gonna need to have available before ES launches.  you might get away with an init script or a few lines in rc.local that just loops until a necessary directory exists.

[UEDan]

No, I use that share for everything around my apartment. I have a pi dependent on a share to work correctly(not an arcade)

vinegar hit the nail on the head. Easiest thing to do is to while loop on the mount until files start showing up before starting Emulation Station.
Plugged in, mounting takes a second. You'll just be limited by the Pi's 100mbit transfer speeds.