USB Boot on Raspberry Pi 4

Installation Home Assistant OS
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This may come back to bite me, but I toasted an SD card a while back and decided to move two rpi4’s over to SSD’s. I wanted cheap but not straight off the boat cheap, and I didn’t need much storage because I’m just running home assistant and other little stuff. I picked up two startech cables but couldn’t find a good drive. Everything was either bigger than I needed or too expensive.

After a bunch of googling, I found this drive. I’ve had no problems booting both raspberry pi OS and home assistant OS from these drives, and they’re cheaper than an equivalent SD card. Amazon reviews seen pretty good and my own speed tests showed the drive was quicker than many higher prices drives. Just wanted to share.

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It works with the latest beta release of homeassistant os 5.2 for me, but the initial boot (preparing homeassistant os) took several hours. After the setup it took half an hour for an reboot. Anybody else experiencing this issue? In this state it is unusable :confused: Had to switch back to microsd

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in my case ssd was very slow on usb3 (even causing mouse/keyboard not working under raspbian). USB2 provides light speed.

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Likely to be the USB to SATA adapter or the SSD itself, I’ve set up 5 new HassOS 5.2 systems in the last week and both the initial HassOS setup and reboot are super quick compared to MicroSD cards. Also prepared all RPI4’s by doing a full upgrade of RaspberryPi OS first to get the official September 2020 bootloader version.

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I wouldn’t blame adapter directly since those works flawlessly with other hw/os.it might be rather incompatibility with RPi.

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@maxym Yes sorry I wasn’t suggesting there was anything wrong with the adapter or SSD, rather as you say incompatibility with the RPi.

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It can cause UAS, sata adapter or SSD all described above. I use adapter X825, SSD Kingston A400 120Gb,Rpi4 4Gb without problems

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I thought his issues sounded like mine when I was using adapters the pi didn’t like. Currently using Inatek enclosures. Both with UASP and without.

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Have you guys applied the quirks for the Adapter / SSD, google this forum and there are numerous threads on applying quirks to fix these issues?

BTW I have updated my bootloader to 3/920 and have no issues running 5.2 64bit

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I’ve applied the quirk despite not really seeing a major issue since the performance is still very fast

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Maybe I did something wrong, but my USB boot times are really really slow. I am using a USB 3.0 stick in my USB 3.0 port and no usb ssd or hdd etc

What I Did:

  1. Install latest raspberry pi os on MicroSd and boot it
  2. Update firmware and bootloader to latest September firmware and reboot
  3. Set USB Boot in Raspi-config to the primary boot option and reboot
  4. Flash a USB stick with the latest Homeassistant OS 5.2 64bit
  5. Plug it in, remove the MicroSd and boot

Usb drive boots, but as said before the initial setup took hours and a reboot takes forever after the initial setup.
Do I have to apply any more settings?

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I followed the same procedure on a RPi 4 8Gb with SSD drive. And I have the same (minor) problem:
The boot time is extremely long (about 30 minutes).
Beside that the system works flawlessly and is extremely fast! HA restarts are very fast too (they are by no means reboots as one might think.)

So after all I found that I hardly ever reboot and I can ignore the problem for now and hope that the long boot times will disappear with the stable version of HA OS 5.

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I had the same problem, took hours to boot on usb3 a liite bit better on usb2. Got a new sata to usb adapter and now my SSD boots faster than a SDcard (homeassistant os 5.2 32-bit)

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Are you botting 5.2 32bit or 64 bit?

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I was talking about an RPi4 with 8 GB of RAM. AFIAK the 32 bit version of HA OS is not compatible with the 8GB version of the Pi. You have to use the 64 bit version. And I think the long boot time currently is a given with that version.

I have just published a step by step guide to get the 8 GB Pi up and running with HA:

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My experience is that the latest eeprom is not the way to go. I posted my SSD boot installation/configuration here, running Dev build 5.2 64Bit.

For as far as I know, the 32bit works fine on the 8GB pi by the way.

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@Jpsy did you try boot using usb2? it boots lightning fast for me. First boot obviously takes a few minutes (depending on internet connection speed) because of downloading docker images.

@Recte what’s wrong with bootrom from 3.9? is it something widely kniwn or it’s just issues with your config?

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I don’t know exactly what is wrong with it, but my SSD dit got power at boot time but had no activity with the latest eeprom. In other words, it was not accessible.

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@maxym: This is astonishing! I can fully confirm your observation: Booting with the SSD connected through USB 2.0 takes about 2 minutes. Booting connected through USB 3 takes forever!
I am not happy though to run the SSD over USB 2 as the transfer rate of USB 3 is about 15 times highter. But I did some tests and HA seems to be very responsive. So I will stay with USB 2 until the problem is fixed. Thanks for that information!

@Recte: I cannot confirm this. My SSD has no power problems with EEPROM firmware 2020-09-03 (Crucial BX500 + Sabrent USB 3 adaptor).

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I got my raspberry pi 4 boot from usb stick with HassOS 5.2 beta and everything worked fine less thr Bluetooth sensors, i can get readings from the sensors, but only if i move them really really close to the Pi… And then i went back to the sd card with hassos 4.3 and Bluetooth is working again has it should. Is this a know problem? Or there’s something i can do about it?