Boot from USB SSD

How to Boot a Raspberry Pi 4 From an SSD

Parts

• GeeekPi for Raspberry Pi 4,X862 V2.0 M.2 NGFF SATA SSD Storage Expansion Board with USB 3.1 Connection Support Key-B 2280 SSD Only
• Timetec 1TB SSD 3D NAND SATA III 6Gb/s M.2 2280 NGFF 512TBW Read Speed Up to 550MB/s SLC Cache Performance Boost Internal Solid State Drive for PC Computer Laptop and Desktop (1TB)

Hardware Assembly

Installation

• Download latest Raspberry Pi OS with desktop image from the pi foundation’s website.
• Uncompress the image on Linux/Mac you can use gzip or xz:

  gzip -d 2023-12-05-raspios-bookworm-arm64.img.xz
  

• Use dd or a tool like Belena Etcher to flash your image to a microSD card.
• Boot your Pi 4 off of the microSD card and follow the normal Pi 4 setup steps to expand the file-system, set the language, etc.
• If your USB SSD drive does not show up on your booted Pi Desktop after a few seconds, you likely need to format it.
  • You can use tools like fdisk -l, lsblk, cfdisk and parted/gparted to verify the Pi sees your SSD drive, and to format it to FAT32 if it shows up as a block device, but doesn’t mount.
• From a Pi Desktop terminal, make sure your Pi OS and software are fully up to date

  sudo apt-get udpate
  sudo apt-get full-upgrade
  # Once done
  sudo reboot now
  

• Now update your Pi 4’s firmware

  sudo rpi-update
  # Once done
  sudo reboot now
  

• After reboot, you should now be able to copy your microSD card to your USB SSD as depicted below:
• After the SD Card Copier process completes, verify that you have the latest boot-loader so that we can update which drive to use via raspi-config next.

  sudo rpi-eeprom-update -d -a
  

  • You can see the LATEST and CURRENT match below:
  • 
• Now set the bootloader as depicted in the video to boot from your USB SSD using:

  sudo raspi-config
  

* Peforma write test to see your new SSD speed!

dd if=/dev/zero of=./speedFileTest bs=20M count=5