Openhab 3 / Openhabian SSD Install - Current

All,

just wondering if there is a current set of instructions to run OH/OH3 using openhabian via SSD installed with a PI. I read some of the forum posts and they all seem to be older ?. I guess I could write one as I will probably struggle through this :slight_smile:

openHABian does not support installing on SSD so there are not and will not be any official docs on this.
If you choose to write this down be prepared that any next openhabian update may invalidate your works.

sorry maybe I should have wrote this better, I am just interested in running OH on an SSD to avoid the inevitable SD card failures.

It’s still unclear what you are asking for.
Do you mean OH like openHAB or OH like openHABian ?

There is no need to use an SSD to avoid SD card wearout. The ZRAM feature and of course the bundled backup solution will take care of that.

I have a RPI 3 running (OH2) on a MSATA SSD drive and has been running for ages as I did this a long time ago I was not sure of the best solution.

To coincide with OH3 coming out I bought a RPI4 8gig (get the 4gig one as its less pain) and am now running OH3 on SD card.

What doesn’t jump out at you in the docs is the ZRAM as Markus points out ZRAM will lower the “wear” on you SD card considerably. However you must shut down you PI correctly and should put it on a ups or a power bank that you can charge while using.

Also I have a second SD card in an external reader of the PI that is Mirrored by openHABian. In the event of SD card failure you just take the card in the PI’s reader and chuck it in the bin. Then put the one in the reader in the PI and a new one in the reader.

I do it this way as suggested above that future updates will be seamless. Yes you can run it however you like however it is cheaper and less stress having the setup the way the maintainers have it.

I have been running OH2 on SSD for a couple of months. No problems at all. However, at the time of my first install, Raspbian did not support booting from SSD. So I moved later my partition from SD to an SSD. Worst case, you need to do it like this if for any reasons it does not work from a clean SSD install.

EDIT: See link below . It works right away. Maybe you also disable ZRAM by adding zraminstall=disable to your openhabian.conf

This discussion also deals with your question.
https://community.openhab.org/t/how-to-raspberry-pi3-boot-from-ssd-install-openhab-to-usb-or-ssd-and-boot/58721
Use etcher and select SSD from “hidden drives”