Hard drive in switch dock??

[N4FN]

Hi, first of all please redirect me if there are more appropriate places to ask this.

In an attempt in keeping this as short as possible im just gonna jump into it.

I have recently started interning at an electronic repair shop and started learning about the wonderful world of soldering and dyi projects. So I had an idea and would like some pointers/tips or if someone could tell me im dumb and this will never work.
But essentially what i would like to attempt is to solder in a hard drive into a Switch dock and would like to trick the switch into thinking that it is its own internal memory. So that i can store games on both the Sd card and on the hard drive and transfer data between the two so that i could pick and choose what games go on the Sd card and vice versa.

Is any of this even possible or am i stepping into unknown lands here.


Thanks for reading this whole thing and for any eventual replies

 

[linuxares]

You can do that, but there is really no software except SXOS that can use it. I don't think any FTP supports HDD. DBI do support it but not sure how to transfer stuff to it tho.

 

[N4FN]

You can do that, but there is really no software except SXOS that can use it. I don't think any FTP supports HDD. DBI do support it but not sure how to transfer stuff to it tho.

Would it be worth to move to SXOS though? Im very outta the loop but i thought it was dead.

My current PC doesnt have a wifi card so i wouldnt use any FTP either way. Im fine with transferring stuff into the Sd card and then onto the hard drive when needed/wanted.

Id love it so much if it was possible to somehow trick the switch into thinking that the hard drive is internal memory and just using the file transfer they already provided us with in the settings.

But this has been done before? If so are there guides or anything similar? Ive tried googling but couldnt find anybody that had had the same thought as I.

 

[linuxares]

Depends. SXOS can play a lot of older games. But not newer once.

I guess you could do it via SD card and use NX-Shell to copy the files.

EDIT: No, I don't think so. Sadly the USB on the dock is 2.0 so it's quite slow.

 

[Deleted member 194275]

There is a user here that was creating something that we can describe as a "switch definitive edition". I believe his work had something similar with that you're asking, but maybe I'm remembering wrong.
@binkinator is the user, perhaps he can help you or provide you with alternatives.

 

[N4FN]

Depends. SXOS can play a lot of older games. But not newer once.

I guess you could do it via SD card and use NX-Shell to copy the files.

EDIT: No, I don't think so. Sadly the USB on the dock is 2.0 so it's quite slow.

Oh no i want to essentially solder on a daughter board with a hard drive port onto the docks circuit board. No usb

Post automatically merged: Jul 4, 2023

l

There is a user here that was creating something that we can describe as a "switch definitive edition". I believe his work had something similar with that you're asking, but maybe I'm remembering wrong.
@binkinator is the user, perhaps he can help you or provide you with alternatives.

Thank you

 

[linuxares]

Not sure how that would work without drivers for your daughter board or piggy backing of USB

 

[randy_w]

There is a user here that was creating something that we can describe as a "switch definitive edition". I believe his work had something similar with that you're asking, but maybe I'm remembering wrong.

I had a discussion with him on this topic last year, we did a lot of digging on aliexpress/ebay/amazon/etc. and couldn't find anything that can adapt a SATA hard drive to SD card interface. There are many SD card to SATA adapters though, but not what we were looking for. I think he decided to go with a sd card switcher like this:

and modify it to fit under the kick stand, however I left the forum for a while earlier this year so didn't follow through.

If you want to make a true SATA hard drive to SD interface adapter, you need to make it yourself with FPGA/CPLD. There are open source SATA and SD cores but it's still a big project to link everything together.

If you want to settle with an FTP/HTTP/SMB server built into the dock, it's much easier. Just connect the USB hard drive to a raspberry pi and connect RPi to dock with ethernet. However I don't really see the point with this setup as you can connect the hard drive to the dock directly and install nsp/xci with tinfoil/dbi.

 

[N4FN]

Not sure how that would work without drivers for your daughter board or piggy backing of USB

Thats kinda the tips im on here for

 

[master801]

Oh no i want to essentially solder on a daughter board with a hard drive port onto the docks circuit board. No usb

Post automatically merged: Jul 4, 2023

l
Thank you

Dock is USB-C, so it's redundant.