HASS.IO -> transfer from SD card to SSD or USB

[poudenes]

RPi4: No boot from USB at this moment, so use the workaround for now.

[thatguy_za]

@mat44150

Hello,
I would like to have feedback of SSD users with a Raspberry Pi 3B+:
I changed from a SD card (Sandisk Extreme, 64GB, A2 Class) to a SSD ( PNY SSD7CS900-120-PB 120GB), but I don’t find the interface particularly faster. I even changed for an official Rpi power supply.
My logbook and history takes up to 12-15s to display the last 24h (database is ~360MB), whereas I have read some post where people claim 1s for the same things. Reboot is as slow as before.
Any recommendation ? Was it expected with a SSD connected to the USB 2.0 ports of the Pi ?
Thanks

I moved from a 32gb Sandisk Ultra SD card to a 240gb Crucial SSD on a Pi 3B+ and performance is very similar.

[poudenes]

Im moved from SD Card on a RPi4 to SSD.
Speed is better. Less stress because SDCard won’t fail anymore. Its only used to boot first part rest goes to SSD

[paddy0174 (Patrick)]

Thanks for writing down these instructions, but unfortunately, you have some mistakes in your description, that you shouldn’t publish to other “not-so-familiar” Rasbpian users.

• You don’t need to format your SSD in FAT. It doesn’t do any good (fortunately it doesn’t harm either, but that’s not the point, it’s not necessary), otherwise you wouldn’t reformat it with the next step.
• You should never ever assume, that drives are always the same mount point in Linux. /dev/sdXY can be every usb drive. To know which mount is always correct, you should use a PARTUUID from exactly this drive (your SSD).
• the rsync command is doubled, -v shows all activities regarding the sync, whereas --progress shows only the status of the copying. Either one, not both.
• In cmdline.txt it’s like the above. Without knowing, which mount point is which, you shouldn’t assume. The correct handling would be to find the correct mount point and PARTUUID with lsusb and blkid and set this. An example:
  root=PARTUUID=abcdefg1234 rootfs_type=ext4
• Resize is an important part of the installation, otherwise you may end up with only a few GB of free space on your shiny, new SSD card (hint: the space, that your sd-card offers, so it’s easy to make a 2TB SSD into a 64GB SSD…) On the other hand, if you don’t format your SSD, as said above, you won’t have that problem, as your drive is already formatted with ext4…
• You shouldn’t (and you don’t need to) use sudo -i. In this case it’s even contra productive, as you install docker as root. That’s not the way you should go, and it’s not the way, Docker explicity states. You should run the docker install command as normal user, root is not never ever a good idea.
• If you run the docker install as user, you do have the right permissions set, but you need to add the docker user to your usergroup.
  sudo usermod -aG docker pi
  These two points are working hand in hand: if you do install docker with incorrect user permissions, you will later run docker as root, which will compromise your system on day!
• And last but not least, you’re using the wrong image for HomeAssistant. It’s either the RPi4 image, for this tutorial, or it’s the RPi3 image, then this whole tut is useless…
  Tbh I’m impressed, that this image is running on a RPi4 without any errors. The forum is full of exactly this problem. Would be interesting to know, how yours is running…

Again, thanks for writing this tutorial, it’s always great, that others contribute, but next time please check the content more thoroughly before you post it. Especially the wrong use of permissions and the use of a not correct image will lead others to problems.

[poudenes]

@paddy0174 Sorry for that. I posted because it worked for me. didn’t realise some things are not working for others. Beside some parts I found on the internet and used it.

For your last question: With this tut it works great on my RPi4! Rebooted many times because of adding new things in HA. No problems at all…

[inthehoose]

I initially migrated from an RPI 3B+ with SD card (32GB Sandisk Endurance) over to a Crucial BX500 120GB SSD but didn’t notice any performance improvements. The biggest improvement was moving to a 4GB RPI 4B with the same 32GB Sandisk Endurance card, where I noticed 3 day history graphs (of room temps, humidity etc) were loading up at least 50% faster.

I’m waiting for the Raspberry Pi Foundation to implement official USB boot support on the 4B before I switch back to the SSD to get the full benefits of USB 3 as well.

[niraviry]

Just to let everyone know.
Most of the USB to SATA cases use simple chips (ASTMedia usually) that run around 25 to 50MB/Sec.
The only USB 2.5" cases I know of that do run fact are the Zalman ZM-VE500 that use ARM chip. This one is expensive (around $70) but it runs 300MB/Sec or so. I did not check the lower models.
I use these and only these USB SATA cases. I have tens of them and all are OK for few years now.

[ThaNerd (Turbo Tronix)]

My mSATA with the x850 didn’t work. So got a sata drive with a cheap usb cable and now I’ve finally switched everything. Even got a 3d printed case, but might go caseless cuz noticed the cpu temps got higher.

[Jotty]

Hi,

what RPi du you have? As far as I know it’s not possible to boot from USB on a RPi4. Correct me, if I’m wrong.

[paddy0174 (Patrick)]

Take a look here:

Rpi 4 installation

The only way I got SSD booting on Pi4 is to go with Raspbian Buster instead of HassOS and then install Hassio on top. The caviat is that you will still have to have sd card plugged in to boot but then everything will run of SSD usb. I got a Kingston A2000 NVMe drive (it’s pretty cheap considering the speed you get) and Shinestar adapter for it . While you are there pickup yourself this bad boy heat sink case Pi4 runs much hotter then pi3 and will throttle, and you will be back at pi3 speed …

Yep, Pi4 is only bootable from USB, if you leave a microSD in it.

[pedroborges]

Well, I have a Raspberry pi 3.

I flashed a sd card with raspbian and added program_usb_boot_mode = 1 to the test file config.txt to boot from ssd.

but I have a problem, only sometimes it starts by ssd.

can’t always boot from ssd.

would appreciate help

[jelle2503 (Jelle)]

Im using the suggested a3ssd–|--Kingston A400 120GB SSD (SA400S37)–|--Startech USB3-SATA3 adapter (USB312SAT3CB)–|--Y–|--Y–|--bootcode.bin–|----|–

And i am able to boot raspbian from my SSD just fine on my pi3, with an sd card with bootcode.bin on it.

However when I flash my hassos image, I just get nothing. Nothing on the IP address, and nothing on my monitor. I’ve waited for half an hour. Absolutely nothing.

Does anyone seems to know what I am doing wrong?

[kitus]

Check my post above: HASS.IO -> transfer from SD card to SSD or USB

I ended up purchasing a new SSD for 25€ and I’m now a happy camper running off an SSD

[kajmaj]

this 194 might be a reason.
All it depends on the way how RPi with SSD is shut down.

[truglodite]

@jelle2503, I’m not 100% sure what might be causing your problem, but that also happened to me the first time upgraded hassos when I converted to ssd. I think it was due to the new firmware that comes on new hassos installs. If your pi has older firmware (likely if you haven’t yet installed hassos >=3.4), the install process will involve a reboot after flashing firmware. Not sure, but I suspect that if you don’t have a newer firmware yet, the first flash to the new firmware may require an extra reboot or 2 before it runs properly (perhaps the hassos install isn’t handling the initial firmware upgrade properly, or there’s something in that firmware that requires a power off afterwards to setup properly).

All I know is I’ve updated hassos several times since with zero issues. At least 2 of those recent updates also included updated pi firmware. So if you have troubles at first, sometimes persisting to install again, or rebooting the pi when it appears to become unresponsive during install, may complete the firmware install after which it will work fine.

[DavidFW1960 (David)]

Just a note… it doesn’t actually flash anything. The firmware is in the ‘image’ it does not write to flash on the RPi itself. If you boot the Pi with an old SD-Card hey presto you are back to old firmware again.

[truglodite]

Thanks for the insight; excellent info to know. I’m used to the world of arduino with ‘real firmware’, softbricking, etc… so this is new to me. So then it must have been some other random problem that went away after a couple tries.

[juicejuice (juice)]

Someone is working on an automated solution for all this soon, in the meantime I’ve documented the manual steps (tested on RPi 4) here: https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/issues/164#issuecomment-602145682

I note that there is still no Raspberry Pi 4 option for direct boot to SSD, and it doesn’t look imminent either. You have to use an SD+SSD configuration. Raspberry Pi 3 can direct boot to USB, no SD card required: https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/blob/2e7e0398996c5fb39e566e9d6d72df2975ac9f39/Documentation/boards/raspberrypi.md

[bart56]

The last command:

curl -sL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/home-assistant/hassio-installer/master/hassio_install.sh" | bash -s--m raspberreypi3

returns:

bash: line 1: 404:: command not found.

If I go to the site, there are no files there. Can someone tell me what I’m doing wrong?
Thanks

[paddy0174 (Patrick)]

Because you have the wrong link. You can find the correct link on the installation page.

Installing Home Assistant

The problem is, if the links get updated by home assistant, the tutorials mostly don’t get updated (understandable).

And you didn’t used the correct writing for raspberrypi. So in the end, it should be:

curl -sL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/home-assistant/installer/master/installer.sh" | bash -s -- -m raspberrypi3