I’ve read in a lot of places that SD cards are actually not the best way to run HA, so I’ve been trying to migrate to an SSD, but I’m running into a wall here.
I’ve followed this guide as close as possible:
I even bought the same Ugreen SATA dongle, because I heard some of those aren’t compatible.
The only difference I can see is that I have a Pi5, so it’s an “NVMe/USB boot” instead of just “USB boot” for me, but I’m pretty sure that’s the same thing here…
But despite all that, when I get to the step of removing all SD cards and plugging my SSD in, then rebooting, it just never seems to do anything. The little light on the dongle and the Pi itself are blinking, so it seems to be at least trying to read something, but even after waiting 10+ minutes it just doesn’t anything, doesn’t allow me to connect.
Does anyone have any idea what might be going wrong here? Or how I could go about debugging what the problem is?
Basically what you should do is to create backup, install haos on ssd and boot from that ssd to ha. When you boot to it then you restore your backup to ha. And hopefully it should work.
If you’re using an SD card and it’s a good quality one chances are you will be fine. As mentioned in the one of the comments they are rated to have thousands or write/erase cycles per cell so would likely last years without issue. An NVMe is mainly going to be better for speed more than anything and if your HA server is doing a lot of things and has a lot of apps running, then you’d notice a speed difference.
Given your using a Pi5 I’d say you should probably use the pci capability rather than a usb adapter, especially given how cheap they are. I’ve got the Argon One V5 case and then followed https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/accessories/m2-hat-plus.html ignoring the hat related parts and it worked with no issues