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I'm running Win10 64bit as my host PC, with 64bit Ubuntu on Virtual box. I have an Rpi running retropie and a large amount of ROMs I'd like to copy over; USB and network transfer have proved slow - can I use my Ubuntu VM to drop them into the relevant folders on the SD card with an SD card reader?

Laura Duffy
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    You'd get a similar slowdown on SD cards too, the bottleneck for VMs writing to USBs, SD cards, etc. is all the Host system. And that's going to be a bottleneck for any type of data I/O. – Thomas Ward Mar 15 '18 at 16:29
  • Well, with USB I have to write to a flash drive on my pc then wait for the pi to copy them all across. – Laura Duffy Mar 15 '18 at 16:30
  • you didn't indicate that this is an RPi that's involved here. The issue will still be the SD card read/write I/O speed because it still has to pass through the host as well. The write speed problem is going to have the same problem. I don't think VBox has the capacity to do SD card pass through, though VMware does. – Thomas Ward Mar 15 '18 at 16:32
  • I said in the OP I'm using an Rpi. So is it worth trying? – Laura Duffy Mar 15 '18 at 16:34
  • you say "I have an RPI running and a large amount of ROMs I'd like to copy over". You don't mention where the RPi comes into play with the VM. If you're getting network transfer speed slowdowns, and you're using VBox, you can't pass the SD card through to the VM in VBox. VMware products allow this, in certain cases, but that's a question beyond the scope of what you're asking. If you can figure out the SDCard passthrough part, then yes you can use the VM, but if you can't figure out SDCard passthrough (VirtualBox doesn't do it I don't think) then you can't. – Thomas Ward Mar 15 '18 at 17:19
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    If your SD card reader is connected via USB (even if it's a laptop internal one, it might still be internally connected via USB), you can use Virtualbox's USB pass through, which will work. Otherwise, there are ext4 drivers for windows, which will allow you to read / write the card natively, in windows. – Jonas Czech Mar 15 '18 at 20:16

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