Raspberry Pi and SSD drive for Home assistant

1

Hi
I have seen that a SSD can be added to the Raspberry Pi . Is there a tutorial to add an SSD drive to Raspberry PI and installing HA

Help and comments will be appreciated

2

I have not found one but I have done it. I had a spare laptop SSD and bought a USB case from Amazon.

Basically, I flashed the SSD with Raspbian Lite using Etcher. It complained about a 120 GB SD Card, but it worked. When booted off the SD Card there is some configuration to get it to boot off USB. I think I need the SD Card removed to actually boot though.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/msd.md

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3

I did the same as bosborne. I have a RPi3b+. I used Win32 DiskImager to write a backup of my old installation (homeassistant already installed) to the SSD. Afterwards I used a USB2SATA to connect it to the raspberry, removed the SD card and the system booted successfully into my old installation.

Some hints:

  • If you have a raspberry lower than RPI3b+, you need to google how to enable boot per USB, but it is easy.
  • Not all USB2SATA adapters work well. I bought one which was not working at all at the raspberry but another did. So it is probably some luck (or research) involved. It may be also caused by the fact that I did not want to use another power source and therefore required a usb controller with less power consumption.
  • A raspberry kernel bug (I guess) causes to have a significant idle CPU load (around 20%) when the system runs from the SSD. To avoid this, just add a SD Card (does not matter what data it contains) to the raspberry and the cpu load is gone. However, in my case, it also prevents me from restarting the system without manually removing the SD card again, which is quite a significant downside :sweat:

Overall, it is a good idea to take this step and move your installation to a SSD drive.

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4

Thank you guys , sounds good . Much appreciate it. Going to try it, just hope I choose the correct USB2SATA adaptor , I need to do some reading. Thanks

5

Here is what I bought.

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6

Cool thanks

7

I use 32GB USB stick / thumb drive on my Raspberrys. Much more reliable than SD cards and much cheaper that SSD.

You won‘t get any benefits from an SSD, neither in speed nor in reliability.

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8

Thanks appreciate it. I probably give that a try first as I have a good USB stick available . Just need to see how to get my Raspberry PI to boot from the stick and moving my HA to the stick.

9

That’s debatable, if you bought a cheap stick, some of those are good for about 8mb/sec write which would definitely be noticeable.

A good fast USB stick wouldn’t cost a lot less than what my SSD and cheap case cost anyway.

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10

This is true, but in terms of reliability, I would rather trust a SSD, which is designed for intensive read/write processes in an operating system instead of an USB stick, which is designed for occasional transport of documents or media files.

In my past, I already killed multiple USB sticks with writing too much data on it, but never a SSD drive (they were cheap USB sticks though).

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11

I already had the SSD sitting in a drawer so for me the case made sense. I had put a larger SSD in my laptop.