enough is enough I waited for more than
half a year to put my new Raspberry Pi 4
from SSD to increase its speed and
reduce the chance of losing my valuable
data today we will change that without
the help of the Raspberry Pi project
team
all we need is know-how a little bit of
time and an old SD card great see you
tubers here is the guy with the Swiss
accent with a new episode and fresh
ideas around sensors and
microcontrollers remember if you
subscribe you will always sit in the
first row fortunately it is quite easy
to use an SSD as a boot medium and takes
less than one hour of work if you stick
to the commands shown in this video
when I did my review about the new
Raspberry Pi for in video number 275 the
software was not ready at all I
suggested waiting till Christmas for a
purchase for most of the missing parts I
was right they are all here and I love
my pie for because it is faster and has
more memory one part still is lacking
the PI 4 cannot put directly from an SSD
as it was possible for the Raspberry Pi
3 for example why would we want this
feature SD cards never were made for
usage as storage mediums for computers
they were made for cameras where big
files are stored and stay there for a
long time
computers tend to store small chunks of
data and change it all the time two
completely different usage patterns SSDs
are much better in these disciplines as
we will later see and the chance you
lose your data on a modern SSD is very
very low they use their leveling to
avoid fast aging after some research I
found the process which is proposed by
James a chambers most useful he names
his block legendary technology block not
a nomenclature a switch
would use we like the understatement
anyway James did excellent work already
in the past by performing speed tests
for SD cards on raspberries he extended
this work also to the module four as we
will later see but first we have to make
this bloody pie for boot from an SST I
use two SSDs for my tests this small 128
gigabyte SSD purchased exactly for that
purpose and this unused 500 gigabyte
Samsung SSD in an Oracle case both
provide USB 3 with a blue connector what
are the steps we have to perform as a
first step we have to check our chance
of success James provides a list of
problematic adapters unfortunately my or
eco adapter is on this list but it is
also on the list of working devices so
we have to see if it will work or not
and what we can do about it the King
spec SSD is not on the list the next
steps are copy raspbian to an SD card
using ballina
hhor-- copy the same raspbian on an SSD
in the exact same manner we now have
digital twins change the part UUID of
our SSD like that the two storage
devices are no more digital twins now
they are brother and sister so to speak
change the boot disk definition on the
SD card change the root location on the
SSD and resize the partition on the SSD
to use all available space on this disk
as a last step we will check the
performance of our enhanced raspberry
and we'll compare it with the one of SD
card james suggests that we use a virgin
raspbian for this adventure others
proposed you can also copy an existing
SD card to your SSD I am cautious with
such things because I lost too much of
my life time searching for on
defined errors so I will go the safe way
let's start with the first two steps and
copy raspbian Buster on an SD card and
on one of the SSDs I use an old 8
gigabyte card because it's beats does
not matter in this setup and it is big
enough also for the desktop version of
raspbian for my various raspberries i
usually install the desktop version here
I use a Logitech mouse and keyboard
combo a monitor and an HDMI switch if I
want to use one raspberry with desktop I
insert this small USB dongle for the
keyboard and mouse and switch the HDMI
to the respective cable by the way you
can copy both images in parallel by
starting villena Eicher twice and you
can ignore this message which is
displayed for large disks if you copy in
parallel you will already discover the
speed difference the SSD will be much
faster do not forget to add a file with
the name SSH on the SD card if you want
to connect from your PC and the WPA
supplicant conf file if you want to use
Wi-Fi please do not forget to do the
same on the SSD otherwise you will not
be able to login from remote now we have
our digital twins and can insert the SD
card in a Raspberry Pi 4 and boot if you
want to compare the speed of this SD
card with the SSD you have to set the
benchmark with the SD card now later
this will not easily be possible you can
use James performance evaluation script
and start it now
it runs some well-known speed tests and
evaluates a speed score for your SD card
if you want you can compare this score
with the various scores on James website
you find a link in the description
because I use a cheap 8 gigabyte cart it
is slower than the slowest cards on the
James List
its score is 400 because in the future
this cart will only be used during the
boot process I do not care about it by
the way my fastest SD card is this
SanDisk Extreme Pro its score is one
thousand seven hundred and seventy four
times faster than the cheap and small
one now we can insert the SSD and change
its part UUID to differentiate the two
disks if you want to get fast speed of
course you have to insert it into the
blue USB 3 connector of the pi/4 we use
fdisk
to change part UUID and james suggests
to use this number as the new identifier
that is what i will do - first we print
the partition table with a command p and
c the usual two partitions of raspbian
called SD a one and sta two by pressing
X we can change into the expert mode and
with AI we can enter the new partition
number in hexadecimal this is why we
have to add 0x in front of the code with
our we exit the expert mode and with W
will write a petition table to the disk
done if we check all partitions with BLK
ID we see that the part UUID of the SD
card and the SSD are now different as
planned next we have to change command
line dot text in the boot directory to
point to our SSD instead of the SD card
if you want you can create a backup of
the file by using this command with sudo
nano
we can change the part UUID after saving
the file with ctrl X and s we can reboot
during the boot process we can already
see if we were successful the SSD should
blink because it is used during boot
thumbs-up it blinks maybe also thumbs up
for this video and if you like videos
like that one it is probably time to
subscribe to this channel if we included
the SSH file also in the boot partition
of the SSD we now can login to the
pimped raspberry from remote if you need
additional confirmation that everything
is ok you can issue this command it
shows our SDA - as the boot partition
next we have to change also the root
directory from the SD card to the SSD
otherwise all our files would still be
stored on the slow SD card for that we
have to change the part UUID of the root
directory in EFS tab from the SD card to
the SSD partition save the file and
reboot as the last step we have to
expand the partition to use the full
disk size F disk shows our two
partitions the second partition has only
a size of 3.3 gigabyte we have to delete
it with the command T and the number 2
then we have to create a new partition
with the same number and the same start
address
the end address is selected by default
we do not want to remove the signature
and write the new configuration to the
disk
now the disk should be ok we reboot the
last time to check if everything went
well
TF minus H shows us that unfortunately
nothing went well our disk still has the
size of 3.3 gigabyte fortunately this is
easy to solve just key in this command
and wait for a while
then TF minus H shows what we always
wanted a huge disk but is it all so fast
how is the speed score with a new
configuration
remember the slow SD card had a score of
400 and my fastest horse in the SD card
stable one of 17 hundred and 70 again we
use James command to perform the exact
same tests as before and the result is
six thousand nine hundred and eighty six
a staggering 17 times faster than the
small cart and still four times faster
than the SanDisk Extreme Pro cool now I
can match the fast pie for CPU with a
fast SSD besides that I will never have
to think about losing data because this
SSD will last forever the amount of data
moved by my small Raspberry Pi is not
comparable with my PC where I move a few
gigabytes just for one youtube video
because this is a new raspbian install
as usual we have to update it to the
latest version frequent viewers know
that I use docker for my home server
with Graham's IOT stack project the new
installation of all my goodies like
node-red orc Ravana just takes a few
minutes and if I copy all volumes
directories to my new SSD all my data is
available very fast if you also want
such a cool installation maybe you watch
video number 2 95 if not done already so
the King spec SSD by the way has a score
of 7,000 238 faster than the Samsung
astonish and a good deal for $25 the SSD
by the way is most probably throttled by
this Oracle controller the fastest
configurations in James comparison go up
to a score of around 10,000 summarized
we created digital twins consisting of
an
the cart and an SSD drive we changed the
part UUID of the SSD to have brother and
sister instead we change the boot disk
definition on the SD card and the root
location on the SSD as a last step we
resized the partition of the SSD to use
all available space we tested the
procedure with two different
configurations a small and cheap USB SSD
and an old Samsung SSD inserted in a
case with an Oracle USB controller both
worked speed tests show that the SSDs
are at least four times faster than my
fastest SanDisk Extreme Pro SD card SSDs
should last very long because they use
sophisticated we're leveling we achieved
all without the help of the raspberry
development team
I still hope one day they will add the
native boot possibility then this video
will become obsolete because I now have
plenty of fast storage I adjusted the
swap file and made sure it is on the SSD
and not on the slow SD card I hope this
video was useful or at least interesting
for you if true please consider
supporting the channel to secure its
future existence you find the links in
the description thank you bye