I am keen to get expert advice on the best approach to using SSD drives with an RP4.
Our house is in the process of moving away from a now unsupported Vera system to Home Assistant.
I have got almost everything now running on a pi4 on sd card, and being the newbie I am reading everything I saw that ssd is the way to go to avoid conrupt sd cards, so I got an argon m2 case and an ssd chip.
But I can’t find anywhere the pros and cons of ssd boot over usb versus booting from sd with the data disk on the ssd.
Any advice on why one over the other?
I am wondering how to recover a backup if one or other failed if it was a separate data disk, compared to just reinstalling a clean ssd and reimaging and restore. Can’t seem to find any discussion on this.
It seems that the home ass general config page on the web suggests ssd data disk rather than boot so I assume this is the way to go.
And to report the wife value of home assistant is immense. I now have everything in home for her to ask Siri to do things and I get to play in home ass which has been awesome fun. Thanks for advice
I’m by no means an expert, but I can’t imagine there’s a strong reason to worry about booting from an SSD. As far as restoring from a backup goes, as long as you don’t lose access to the backup, there shouldn’t be much of a difference either way since HA can handle exporting and importing the backups. If you’re worried about the SD card having issues, just save your backups to the SSD or, better yet, have an automated backup process to an unrelated drive. Then, you can always reflash the SD card without losing the backups.
Thanks. I will always have the backups, I am religious about that.
If I restore to an sd card if it failed, the data disk would still be on the ssd, so I was wondering if that still was used, or you reformat , or what. I might get a blank sd card and try it all before I go into prod to see what happens so I know for future reference.
I know nothing about Linux or pi’s and just following guides so very exposed if something hard goes wrong.
SSD: Pros (over SD): Generally MUCH faster and doesn’t have guaranteed end of life like SDs do due to the way the tech works.
SSD: Cons (over SD): Takes work to get there, otherwise none. Full Backup your system, take it down, reload the OS from scratch on the SSD, restore your system. (Took me about 3 hours total)
Basically if you already have the gear - block out some time and do it. SD corruption isn’t an IF it’s a WHEN due to the way it works. If you have a way to avoid it, just plan on doing it.
I don’t use SSD, but all my Pi’s (Pi 1 → Pi4) boot from SD and run from old-fashioned HDD. Never had a corrupt SD this way in almost 10 year. Advantage of using an SD to boot is you can use any USB->SATA adapter, you are not limited to the one’s that support boot on a Pi.
(And older Pi’s don’t support boot from HDD/SDD anyway)
Thanks
Do your backup files contain that configuration or if your ever restored it would just work on a new sd card?
I am just trying to workout best approach in case of failure so I know what to do.
I guess I am also wondering what happens if the data disk has a lot of info in influx for example and is bigger size than the sd card. Then you can’t restore. Newbie worries sorry
I don’t quite get that. The only part of the SD card that is used for boot is the (very small) fat partition. The rest is unused.
And it is only used for reading, never written to.