I prefer putting it at the beginning of the microSD card. If I upgrade to a larger card in the future I can just dd it to the other card, and afterwards expand the FAT32 partition to the end of the new card.
With it at the end of the card, moving to a bigger microSD card is a bit trickier, although it still can be done.
True, though if the emuNAND was actually recognized as a partition instead of being "unpartitioned", making images of it or cloning it to a new drive would be easy. Instead, we need tools made specifically for the Switch to do such things if we don't want to image the entire card, or fuck around in a hex editor to extract just the emuNAND out of it.
I followed some guides online, installed EmuMMC, and all the guides tell you to make a partition of 30GB.
So I did that, but I have no idea why. I have a 120GB SDcard, I installed everything (Atmosphere etc.,) on the 90GB partition like the guide told me to.
I got it working, it's as if I have two Switches now, but I just feel like I took 30GB of my SDcard for no reason.
Does EmuMMC install something in there, or did I do something wrong? Windows doesn't recognize the partition so I can't see what's in there.
Actually, the first version of Xecuter's emuNAND solution did store the emuNAND as files inside the real NAND. There are several drawbacks to this.
First of all it will be slower and more prone to corruption, as there is an additional file system layer inside the existing file system, making reading and writing less straightforward. It doesn't have a huge impact if programmed correctly, so this is
mostly a non issue.
Secondly, and more importantly, this effectively halves the space on your NAND as half of it is used for your sysNAND and half of it is used for your emuNAND. Not a huge deal if you have a big SD card and store all your games on it, but keep in mind save data is always stored on NAND and this could add up to quite a bit over time especially on a hacked console with lots of games, or if that console is used by multiple people with separate accounts.
And thirdly, it is really easy for Nintendo to detect these files stored on the NAND. Something they could almost as easily do with emuNAND on SD, but you could simply eject the SD card before you boot into OFW and there would be no way to tell that your console has ever had an emuNAND on it. Can't really do that if it's all stored in your internal NAND...
And keeping emuNAND on a separate partition is just in general cleaner. I for one like keeping all my CFW stuff fully isolated from my legit stuff. Might not matter to some people though.
And yes, emuNAND
does need to take up some amount of space. At minimum, however much space the other partitions besides USER take up, and some amount of space for USER itself for save data unless you want USER to be shared between sysNAND and emuNAND (which would be a bad idea and likely result in bans eventually)
That's because the entire premise is to have a separate set of firmware and system/user data so that you can update one without affecting the other, or keep your sysNAND clean from the log files and installed nsps you have in CFW, so you can go online with your legit games.
It doesn't
need to be on the SD, but it needs to be somewhere Where it's placed doesn't matter as to how much space it takes up that you're not able to use for games. Putting it on the SD card just makes more sense.
However, you can install games to NAND while in emuNAND which allows you to use most of that ~30GB that the emuNAND takes up to store games on. The other partitions are only like 3GB in total, so there's a whole ~27GB there for you to use for installed nsps and save games. So you're not giving up as much space as it might seem.
