How To Boot A Raspberry Pi 4 From An SSD

today we're going to be looking at how to set up a raspberry pi 4 to boot from a usb connected ssd there are loads of guides available online for this already but i've had a lot of questions recently about how to do this so i thought i'd share my method this is by no means the only or the best way to do it this is just how i do it i'm going to be doing this on my latest plywood power case build with an m.2 nvme drive but the process is the same for any usb attached solid state or disk drive to make it easier to follow i'm going to assume that we're starting from scratch if you've already got your power running on a micro sd card then you'll need to skip past this first section i'm using a 32 gigabyte sandisk extreme microsd card but you can use a smaller 16 gig card if that's what you've got available we're going to start out by using the raspberry pi imager to flash the raspberry pi os image onto our sd card this is done by selecting the operating system which in our case is going to be the 32-bit version of raspberry pi os we'll then choose our target which is our sd card and then click on write this will then download the operating system image and flash it to your sd card so depending on your internet speed this may take a few minutes to complete when it is complete plug the sd card into your power don't close up any covers as you'll want to remove it again once your pi is booting from the ssd the next step may or may not be required depending on what file system your ssd has been formatted in you'll need to reformat the drive using the fat32 file system this is easily done on windows by right clicking on the drive and selecting format or on a mac using the disk utility and selecting ms-fat and then the default scheme once this is done you can plug in your ssd and boots up your part if you haven't done so already your drive should then appear on your desktop after a few seconds if it doesn't appear then it's likely using an incompatible file system and should be reformatted to fat32 next open up a new terminal window it's best to run apt updates and apt full upgrade to make sure that your power software is up to date once this is done run the following command to update your pass firmware enter y when prompted once the firmware update has been complete you need to reboot your part when you're back on your desktop go to your menu then accessories and then sd card copier this will open a simple window with a from into drop down list select your sd card as the from target and your ssd is your 2 target then click on start and click yes to continue this will partition your ssd and copy the contents of your sd card to each partition now we just have to tell the part to boot from the ssd rather than the sd card open up the new terminal window and enter the following command to make sure that you've got the latest bootloader mine looks like it's already up to date next open up the configuration tool and go to advanced options and then bootloader version select the first option to use the latest software and then note so that it doesn't revert to defaults then go back to advanced options and select boots order click on the second option for usb boot you can now finish and shut down your part once your pie is shut down remove the power cable and then the sd card our power should now boot up from the ssd so let's close it up and see you'll notice right at the top when booting that it now says that the boot mode is usb and that no sd card is detected when your desktop loads you'll also notice that you no longer have ssd mounted as an external drive so you won't have an icon for it on the desktop anymore we can do a quick and basic write test by entering the following command in the terminal to write a 100 meg file our file took just over half a second to write at a speed of 190 megabytes per second next we'll try reading the same file this takes a little under half a second with the read speed of 215 megabytes per second this is a really basic indication of the speed increase you'll get from an ssd there's a lot more to the speed of a draft than simply reading or writing a single large file i'll leave a link to some good comparisons in the video description let me know in the comment section if you've got your power booting from an ssd and let me know if there's anything you do differently thanks for watching please remember to like this video if you enjoyed it and subscribe for more tech and electronics projects tutorials and reviews you

Channel: Michael Klements

Views: 118,635

Keywords: Raspberry Pi, Pi 4B, Raspberry Pi 4B, SSD, Solid State Drive, NVME, M.2, mSATA, SATA, 2.5, Boot, Boot Up, Raspberry Pi OS, Rasbian, USB, USB 3.0, USB C

Id: a8nzkLryGmM

Length: 5min 41sec (341 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021