Raspberry Pi3B+ and SSD

[LindaFNM]

I’d be grateful for advice please, I’ve read the wiki etc but not sure I understand properly. I have a Pi and am planning to add a Kingston A400 SSD with a USB Sata cable which won’t need extra power.

Can I move CumulusMX to this and run it from there? It sure if it needs to be in Home/Pi/ to run correctly. Eventually I’ll add Apache 2 with a view to running web pages on my home LAN......

Thank you.

[philpugh]

Yes - this is possible!

There are two ways to do this :

1/ Boot from SD card as usual and move your /home directory ( together with pi/CumulusMX etc to the attached SSD drive. Have a look at https://www.howtogeek.com/442101/how-to ... ard-drive/ to give you an idea of how to achieve this.

2/ Boot from the SSD directly - the 3B+ supports this out of the box. In this way everything just works as usual - but with slower loading speeds due to the lower performance of USB2. You can find out how to do this on https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentati ... des/msd.md

I have run CumulusMX in both these ways in the past - now I run CumulusMX from SD card on Pi Zero W and have my web site and Maria database on a 3B+ booted from 256Gb SSD drive via USB. It seems to work fine for me!

Good luck !

[LindaFNM]

Phil, thanks very much for your reply. I’ve read so much and there’s so much info that sometimes a simple pointer is very helpful. I wasn’t sure about the Pi directory part. I’ll do some experimenting and try both ways. I’ll start with the easiest way first!

[mcrossley]

I set my 3B (and now my 4) to boot directly from SSD. Boot speed is still fine, and for me it's one less moving part (the SD card) in the system.

[LindaFNM]

I now have my SSD, and have read a lot! This almost seems too simple, I have a GUI interface. Please can someone confirm that I need to use the facility on the Pi to copy the whole image to the SSD, set up the PI to boot from this, then remove the SD card and boot the Pi? Than you.