Unlike the sd card, your hard drive should be formatted to exfat.
NTFS is not supported as far as I know and the SD card exfat issues are not present at the HDD XCI mounting thing (since nothing is written to the drives, it just reads from there to mount the games).
And unless you want to split all of your games bigger than 4 GB just go with exfat there. Works pretty well.
Also there's literally no limit to how big the drive can be (they raised the limit for that to an unreachable high value with an SX OS update in the past so if you use the newest beta you will be fine).

 

You can't play NSPs off hard drive, only XCIs. NSPs can be installed to the sd card from hard drive only.

You can convert NSPs to XCIs using this program https://gbatemp.net/threads/nsc_bui...lder-game-updates-dlc-in-a-single-xci.522486/

You will need your keys from your Switch, use Lockpick_RCM.

 

What I do is have them all XCI then I can either play them or install them to sd card and if I want to delete them off sd card I still have them on external hard drive to play. Yes keys are needed if you want to convert NSP to XCI.

 

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And once I do that where do I put the keys? Just to my root?

 

Usually the keys have to be in sd:\switch\ as prod.keys or keys.txt
Lockpick RCM creates a prod.keys at that directory and since some homebrews are looking for a keys.txt I just duplicate that file there and name it keys.txt

And yes, you can have NSPs on your hard drive as well and install them whenever you want.
You can store your NSPs and XCIs in these directories on HDD:

Code:

/sxos/updates
/sxos/dlc
/switch/updates
/switch/dlc
/sxos/games
/sxos/xci
/sxos/nsp
/sxos
/switch/games
/switch/xci
/switch/nsp
/switch

And as someone else already wrote, formatting it with Windows to exfat is completely fine.

I would recommend XCIs though since you can include the latest update and all DLCs along a game into one single XCI file using NSC Builder.

 

No it should work even if you put it at the root of your hard drive. You're saying it's not showing on the Switch? Did you go to album?

lordelan is giving you the folder formats if you want to try them, but for me I don't have my XCIs in any folder and they show up and work.

 

Are you using a proper hard drive or a flash drive?

 

It won’t work unless I put the games directly on the root of the HDD, so I can Organizeit a lil bit? But other then that I got it figured out! Thank Ya’ll so much!!!!!!

 

It's not that. It's because the exfat issues from sd card usage which are caused by writing to the card which can lead to corrupted sectors when somethings goes wrong are not really present by SX's HDD usage since they are only mounting (reading) things from there but not writing so they can't really corrupt it (at least theoretically).