Thanks for this detailed article. By follow it I was able to put together
a RPI 4B 4Gb, a Samsung 860 EVO 260Gb SATA memory block, and an Eluteng
SATA-to-USBb 3 adapter, with the 64-bit version of HA 5.2 flashed on.
After about 10 minutes the normal opening screen cam up, and a current
snapshot from the running system was read in. To my pleasant surprise,
the system came up with everything in place and running properly.
Again, thanks so much for the effort put into researching and publishing this
blog/article.
CTFrank
BTW: an initial attempt using a WD Blue 500 SN500 NVMe SSD with a Plugable
SSD-to-USB 3 housing/adapter failed to boot; haven’t yet figured out why…
What are the chances! I just decided about an hour ago that I wanted to tinker with HA. Found your post. Took about 15 minutes to get my RPI 4B 4Gb up and running (Adata SU635 240Gb with Startech USB adapter). Thanks for making this so easy! So nice to see HA picking up on all my devices.
@ConcordGE I am using a 120 GB Crucial BX500 connected to a Sabrent EC-SSHD adapter. Not sure wether this is the best solution, as I still have reduced performance when I connect this combination to the USB 3 port of the Pi. I really flies on USB 2, but maybe with another adapter you might be fast on USB 3 too (or even faster).
I would be very interested to hear from other users with other equipment whether they also experience longer boot times and slower response (i.e. when opening the history) on USB 3 compared to USB 2.
Hi @Noobz, very interesting indeed!
I have immediately ordered the ELUTENG adapter after reading that guide. It is even cheaper than the Sabrent and has good reviews. Will report back here as soon as I have tested it with HA.
Unless I could achieve a notable performance increase on an SSD via USB3 on the Raspberry Pi 4 I wouldn’t be interested going that route. The bottleneck via USB2 would be unacceptable.
I just can’t see enough examples of the hardware combination required to achieve this.
But what is your alternative, @ConcordGE? An SD card? The SSD on USB 2 still outperforms any SD card by a magnitude. And SD cards can never be a permanent solution for HA because they wear quickly under the steady stream of database writes. I killed 3 of them with my HA installation before I came to recognize that.
I’ll hold back till a credible usb 3 solution appears.
Not wanting to get into the failed SD card debate but I’ve only experienced that once and unfortunately the card in question was from a dubious source. So many fakes doing the rounds these days.
### Raspberry Pi Imager
The easiest way to to update the bootloader to the latest version with default settings is to use the [Raspberry Pi Imager](https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/) to install a boot recovery image onto a spare SD card.
Select "Choose OS -> Misc utility images -> Raspberry Pi 4 EEPROM boot recovery"
Raspberry Pi OS also keeps the EEPROM up-to-date: new EEPROM images are applied when the Raspberry Pi 4 next boots.
on this , I have flashed the EEPROM onto SD card. But I couldn’t find a way to remote ssh from my laptop.
can someone help me on this pls? I do not have a monitor/Keyboard.
Sorry, but for that step a monitor and keyboard connected directly to the Pi are needed.
There seems to be an option in Raspberry OS to enable SSH by adding an empty file named ssh to the Pi’s boot partition. With that step it could be possible to execute all needed steps from the command line through SSH. But I did not test that option.
This is exactly what I did and how I set it up @uniquecool , no keyboard/mouse/display connected to my new RPi4. Just place an empty file called ‘ssh’ no file extension, nothing, just put that file on the boot microSD and the Pi checks for it on boot and if it finds it, the SSH server is automatically started and then the file is deleted, so make sure you go into raspi-config to enable SSH still otherwise if you reboot it for whatever reason you won’t have SSH access anymore.
@Noobz I received the ELUTENG adapter today.
It boots HA from my SSD on USB 3 within 1.5 minutes!
GREAT!!! Thanks for that info.
I will update the guide accordingly tomorrow.
This is the piece I am not clear about. I have created an empty file as ssh ( not sure where is that boot partition, I assumed here, attached image) and I see the light is blinking as mentioned on pi documentation. I have connected Ethernet cable, I couldn’t see any new IP assigned on my modem DHCP reservation to ssh.
