Has anyone out there gotten their raspberry pi3 to run off a ssd?. I have been looking into the pidrive boards. I also have a USB to ssd adapter but not sure if I can move a running system to this or even how to do it. Anyone got any tips or tutorials?
All you need is in here:
Edit: ahh, yes, the tutorial is here:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/msd.md
Follow it step by step, works great (even from cheap, old usb sticks 
)
Mine is running on a 128GB USB SSD harddriveā¦
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Awesome! Thanks for the tip. I searched the forums but hadnt seen that.What type of USB SSD hdd are you using?
This is the usb to sata adapter that came with my ssdā¦
I am trying to understand: Does a SSD has any kind of advantages over an USB stick? Sure, a SSD in general is faster, but as it is connected via USB and as the RPi3 only has USB2.0, does this make ANY difference?
From my understanding a ssd can handle more reads and writes that a SD card or a usb flash drive. There are some special usb sticks that were designed for high read writes for microsofts windows to go product which is a full blown bootable windows enterprise image.
There are many discussions on the web, one of the best summary I could find is this one:
In addition to what has already been said, in endurance tests these SSD drives tend to last over 100TB of writes before dying. The typical user writes about 1 TB in a year so an SSD will last roughly 100 years for a typical user. OH, even with trace logging and loads of persistence, is not going to write that much more than a typical user does day-to-day.
I canāt find the article right now, but even in tests in data centers, SSDs tend to last as long or longer than HDs.
The technology difference in the article @sihui posted makes a huge difference.
For anecdote, Iāve been running all of my servers (openHAB, Mosquitto, Zoneminder, Calibre, OpenVPN, SSHD, nginx, InfluxDB, Grafana, Gogs, OpnSence and many more) for years on an already old SSD. I expect to continue to run for many more.
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Iām running openhabian I havenāt tried to move this to a ssd yet. Has anyone moved their openhabian install? Anything specific to that image that is different from Raspbian?
Hi,
Iām also running openhabian on my PI2 from an external SSD after trashing a SD-card.
Iām using this ORICO external case with an old Samsung 64GB SSD.
The good thing is that I donāt need an external powersupply, the ssd is running fine with usb-power from the PI. Dont forget to set max_usb_current=1 in /boot/config.txt.
As usual, boot is on the SD-Card and the root system is on the SSD.
Iāve installed openhabian on the SD-Card and copied the system over to the SSD and adjusted fstab and the kernel cmdline afterwards.
It runs absolutley flawless since three months.
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Note the difference:
RPi2 can be configured to boot from sd card and have the rest of the operating system running from a ssd.
RPi3 can be configured to boot from usb ssd without the need of a sd card at all (although its beta its working great).
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Iām beginning to think this might be a good candidate for a step-by-step tutorial (maybe two, one for Pi 3 and one for Pi 2) in the Tutorials and Examples section. Is someone who has done this (@sihui?, @peter_juenger?) willing to write something up? It wouldnāt take much I suspect since the bulk of the steps would be references to other existing tutorials. This separate and easy to find thread can then be referenced when this topic inevitably comes up again.
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No problem, I have some spare time at the weekend and will do the write up then.
Edit: for the Pi3
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Hi, fairly new here as I am discovering Openhab, but long time Home Automation hobbyist. Also as a disclaimer, I only have a basic working knowledge of Linux and some of the programming methods used with Openhab. Basically, just enough to be dangerous.
My experience, with an RPi2, booting up from a micro SD card and passing the rest to a USB drive wasnāt that successful. I was able to get everything working fine and didnāt see any issues for a while, but the day that I decided to add an Aeon Labs Z-Wave stick, my whole system came to a halt and froze. I had to go back and redo everything and stay on my SD card. Looking forward to trying the boot to USB, I just ordered a Pi3 for that purpose.
Your mileage may vary and you may have a different method that I used (found mine on the web as part of an XBMC tutorial) but at least wanted to let you know of my experience.
I am also running zwave off a aeon labs 2nd gen zstick. Hope that doesnt cause an issue with booting from ssd.
@bernieb 's experience is from a Pi2, booting from sd, running on a ssd.
A Pi3 does not boot from sd (if configured), it boots from usb ssd ā¦
Will this work on the raspberry pi 3 as well? Or would there be any steps that need to be different?
On the Pi 3 I believe it would be even easier as it will allow you to boot using only the external drive without the need for the SD card in the first place. But I believe these instructions would work on the Pi 3 too. I just wouldnāt recommend them and instead recommend the easier approach. @sihui linked to some instructions to get it going in a posting above.
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Done:
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