Most useful comment ever. "This works automatically with the Pi3b+" It's amazing how one video invalidates hours of searching in mere minutes. Thanks bub. Good work.
I am also using pi but my pi never detects 2.5 inch hard drive. Even the drive does not show up in pi. Its been ages and I am still stuck at it. I also searched many blogs they said you do need power for pi to detect hard drive, it is a low powered device and it will not detect the hard drive. Previously it used to detect but now no more. Whenever I plug the hard drive it shows mmkblk0p.......122mb c fat32 (LBA) when my drive is 500gb and till now I don't what is (LBA) Also I would like to tell I forgot my pi pass and username, when I contacted pi.org they said just reinstall the os and it will not ask for pass and username. So I am using it in that way. Right now I am using kali linux in pi.
@@jojogonjalves4137 Shadowwarrior82 is mostly right, but you have to look at a few things, the total power the PSU you are using outputs, whether the adapter your bought is USB3 or 2 because the USB 2 will max out at 500 mA while USB 3 will be able to use 900 mA. The third thing you need to look at is the total draw of the 2.5 in drive you are using. I have boxes of SSDs and some have very low power draw and some like the 2TB 850 Pro needs 2A to properly run. I also have multiple SATA to USB adapters and I once noticed that the USB 2 model wouldn't properly allow a few of my Enterprise SSD to show up. As for my USB 3 adapter, it works with most drives, but when I use a power hungry one, I use an external power source. For your problem, I think you should check your PSU, I don't think it's providing enough power to your board.
@@jamesbanday Yeah you are right later I changed the usb charger and used a charger more than 2A and it worked. But I was thinking of creating NAS with rpi3b+ and now I am stuck. I thought of connecting hdd through sata port but there is no sata port in rpi. I thought if its possible to connect to hard disk through sata and enclose in a case and make a nas.
@@jojogonjalves4137 You could, but I think you're overthinking the NAS. Yes it is possible to use a SATA to USB enclosure to create a NAS. Here's the instructions. www.ionos.com/digitalguide/server/configuration/raspberry-pi-nas/ The problem you will run into is actually the enclosure itself as they are not all equal. In my experience, these media servers can run very hot and die prematurely if not properly cooled. I don't know where you plan to put it, but you don't need anything special, any of these enclosure will work just fine. www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Drive-Docking-Station-DS-4SSD/dp/B0711L68MS/ref=sr_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=raid+enclosure&qid=1596014527&sr=8-6 You can even use something like this if you wanted. www.amazon.com/12TB-Elements-Desktop-External-Drive/dp/B07VXKF1L4/ref=sr_1_37?dchild=1&keywords=external+hdd&qid=1596014939&refinements=p_n_feature_two_browse-bin%3A5446816011&rnid=562234011&s=electronics&sr=1-37 I personally don't like using one large device for everything. If you take a look at the 4 bay, non RAID enclosure, you will notice that you can access each drive individually if you wanted. I prefer this as that means multiple users streaming from the NAS don't overwhelm the phonographs you place in them. That means you can stream FLAC from one drive while someone else is streaming movies from a second drive while someone is uploading a Go Pro project to another drive. I don't know if you're aware, but the SATA interface only allows for reading or writing at one time so it has to queue things up and juggle constantly. PCIe is able to do both simultaneously, but that's a discussion for another time. By using multiple drives, you can now have multiple users use the NAS without fear of a slow down. I don't know how you want to set it up, but I prefer multiple drives. Since I use a lot of SSD, I tend to favor enclosures that supports UASP. You can read this article to understand why. blog.startech.com/post/all-you-need-to-know-about-uasp/ Here is an article comparing the Pi3+ to Pi4. AS he will explain, having UASP support can really speed up your IOPS and access speeds. Pi3+ only has USB 2.0 and I can confirm that your throughput will be very limited. www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/uasp-makes-raspberry-pi-4-disk-io-50-faster This board on the other hand blows any Pi out of the water, it has a Hexa core Arm processor, using a big.little scheme, a slot for a micro SD card, eMMC and a PCIe m.2 NVME slot. This means you have at least 4 different ways to mount storage on this device. FYI, I don't recommend RockPi for beginners because it takes a little bit of knowledge to get an NVME running at full speed. rockpi.org/rockpi4
Hey Jeff, just wanted to extend my personal gratitude to give me the courage to finally step into Smart Pixel Christmas Light Shows.....as for a number of years used a Mr.Christmas sequencer, but was always afraid to step into this world and you really helped a lot.
Thanks Robert! And Welcome! Be sure to check into the Wednesday night xLights call (see xlights.org). A lot of great into there and folks that can help you out live if you get stuck!
Good Morning (well here is WA it's morning), Your videos are great and have actually inspired me into thinking I would be able to pull off the RGB pixel light hobby. Going into this, I knew my biggest issues were going to be working with the computers, networking, and several programs. I've actually surprised myself in kinda working my way through everything. I've finally able to get my show (all 7 songs on two props) to play from the controller and from the FPP. My final hang up is my Raspberry PI 4 is not connecting to my wifi. I have a new PI and it came in a kit from Cana Kit. I was able to load and configure my PI using the micro SD card that came with my kit. After configuring my PI, I pulled the micro SD card and used a "clean" card to load the FPP onto it. But for whatever reason, the FPP only works on eth0. I've configured the static IP addresses for both the eth0 and wlan0, but when I disconnect my ethernet cable, I lose all connectivity to the PI. Do you have any suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Not off the top of my head, but I'd suggest you call into the xLights Zoom room and have someone take a look at it live. I'm sure they can get you fixed up. Other than that, congratulations on putting that all together!
I think you're right, that small 32 GB Transcend is the first problem and the adapter may be the second problem. The limit may be the controller in the adapter or just the small, crappy nand used in the 32 GB Transcend. I have a 512 GB model and it's way faster due to parallelism.
Nop just a fail had to put my memory card back into boot again but thanks anyway it was worth a try my pi 3 is a bit long in the tooth so perhaps it time to get a pi 4
Hey Jeff, I have 2 questions about this. So since you plugged the ssd into the usb ports, could I just use a usb stick instead? And second, I ripped my sd card slot off my raspberry pi the other day on accident. So is there anyway to get the usb stick (If I can use it instead of a ssd) to work without putting an sd card in at the beginning? Thank you very much!
Booting from a USB stick is possible, but not all USB sticks work. I've had mixed results. You need some way to get the image onto the USB stick and make it bootable.
Something I learned, if you forgot to type sudo before the command you should be able to type sudo !! And it will re-run the command with sudo privilege's
What? No power wall video this week🥴. Patently waiting for the next chapter in that story. I enjoy your lighting video and they were a great resource last season
Thanks! They'll be back. I actually started one, but have to wait until this summer to finish it. Plus, I think some lighting folks take a bit of a break early in the year and I figured some might like the powerwall project. I mean, I think it's neat! LOL! I'm at the stage of processing the cells (video to come) which takes a lot of time so I went with the SSD video which was a quick win. Powerwall will be back next week. Learning a ton and having a blast so I hope that comes through. :)
Possibly. I'm going to test that as soon as the Pi is done shredding an old array. Marketing used the USB3/2 example so I'm assuming it's more of a "you might need it, you might not" kind of thing. :)
I got a Sata ii SSD/USB adapter cable hooked up to my rpi4 with Buster10 32 bit. lsusb has it listed as detected. But I can't find the drive in Media menu so I can open it and view the files. What do feel the problem is?
Good info for anyone needing storage. Would a large USB drive do the same? The truth is; Jeff had a couple of Amazon gift cards from Christmas, and HAD to spend them NOW!!!
Burning a hole in my pocket. LOL! FAT format has a limit of 32GB, but you can write a stretch image so no real limit. Now that you ask, I'll try my 500GB mechanical drive once the Pi finishes erasing an old array in about a week!
I know you've probably already decided the answer, but I'm writing this for any who happens to have the same question. I've tested dozens upon dozens of micro SD, TF, USB, SSD and the advertised sequential transfer speed is irrelevant for OS usage. Latency and 4K read speeds are much more important. SSD have much better controllers than any of the other USB devices out there, I have some of the fastest USB drives on the planet and they are still slower than an SSD in a USB enclosure. Endurance also comes into play when you consider how the controller on USB vs SSD behaves. Garbage collection is terrible on USB flash drives as they were meant for short term storage and not running an OS. You also benefit from parallelism on SSD as you tend to have more nand chips spread out across more lanes to create a "RAID" that increases read and write speeds. Most USB drives have a single, low quality nand package. Another benefit of SSD is the onboard DRAM cache that can greatly enhance performance. If you fully want all of the benefits of an SSD, you must ensure the adapter or enclosure is UASP compliant. If for some reason you must use a USB drive, the cheapest and fastest one I've found is the 128 GB drive from Micro Center, it was the only value drive to use MLC nand from a respected manufacturer. It was much faster than either of the SanDisk or Samsung I owned and they were the fastest ones advertised at the time of purchase. As for the limits of FAT32, it isn't 32 GB, FAT 32 can be used up to 2 TB, it is only Windows that artificially imposes a 32 GB size so it can promote the use of exfat. Any third party app will be able to format FAT32 to any size up to 2TB. As for the FAT32 used for Raspbian, only the boot partition is formatted in FAT32, the rest of the drive is actually formatted in EXT4, the native file system of Linux. The same thing happens in Windows, if anyone bothers to look, there's a small, FAT32 partition for just booting, but the rest of the partition is NTFS. I have no idea how this misinformation about FAT32 being limited to 32 GB persist, especially with all of these experts with RUclips channels.
David says "not enough power." :) The Pi is a surprisingly high load and more if you add any peripherals to the USB ports. When I first started playing with one, Falcon Player couldn't find the USB card because the supply that came with it wasn't big enough. I have a 2.5-amp wall wort on my Amazon page that works great. He didn't say how much the USB port delivers, but not enough for a Pi. Excellent question though! Thanks!
No idea, but I didn't have to load any special drivers for it. I suspect it would behave like other USB thumb drives. Have you tried other thumb drives?
Haha. SD Card longevity can be an issue depending on the application. Like I say in the video, not needed for Falcon Player, but I could see where it might solve a problem for anything that does a lot of writes. Really just playing with the technology a little.
You can get a Pi 4 w/4GB now! Therefore you can hold more App's on internal memory. With a fan on it will last until Pi's come with 64GB! Gotcha too. - Watchmen
@@CanispaterChristmas BerryBoot can't boot android systems unfortunately. I'd need to convert the img to squashfs and there are no clear instructions on how to do that for and android img.
Ah. Yeah, no experience there, but I see a ton of articles on how to run it. Assuming you are trying to do something specific since it appears RPi and Android seem to work together.
Honestly, I don't think I tested with this exact setup, but the concept works. I used a Pi4 to run my lights this past year and it had a USB SATA drive and no SD card. I don't remember if I had to go through all the command line hoops in the video because I think the 4 can boot from USB by default as long as the drive is compatible. I have some USB drives that don't work because they take too long to initialize and the Pi has already moved on, but I have drives that work fine and some work half the time so you may need to experiment a little.
I appreciate all of your videos, and intend to setup my first pixel display for christmas 2019. I've purchased a falcon F48, 1,000 pixels, I have a dozen rpi's laying around, and server power supplies. I'm a long time linux admin, and think I'd probably approach this slightly differently. Instead of booting off the SSD directly, I'd probably just boot off the sdcard, then run fdisk/e2fsck on the SSD.. once complete it, mount it to /home/fpp/media, and add it to fstab so it remounts on boot. Actually, it's identical to how FPP mounts a thumb drive if you decided to use one. This gives you a fully supported FPP booting off the SD card, but also gets you the reliability and speed of an SSD for the majority of the files/data you'd use with fpp.
Thanks! and Welcome! Yeah, this isn't really needed for FPP, but I highly recommend using some sort of USB drive for FPP media. It's great that it can be on the SD card more easily now as the upload performance is better. However, one re-image and you've got to upload everything again. Not so with a USB drive. This video was a result of my YouTubing and thought it was a cool idea for some applications that do a lot of writes. I've have an image for something else that includes an influx DB so assume that would go through a card pretty quickly. :)
@@CanispaterChristmas absolutely agree. I have fpp setup with a USB thumb drive, but also the fpp media directory is backed up daily using borgbackup. Anyway, keep up the awesome videos. they are hugely helpful!
Can you explain the benefits of booting off of the card vs booting directly from the SSD? Many people online have used this method and I can't seem to find any real benefit for it. Why would you want your boot partition on a device that can easily become corrupted during a power loss? Why mess with the card at all if you don't have to? SSDs have come down in price so much, I don't even understand why people are still using micro SD cards for the Pi. I can understand if you have a Pi Zero with a ROM you don't plan to interact too much with, but for a daily driver, I will take the reliability of an SSD any day over any micro SD card. I have cards from 32-512 GB and SSD from 128GB-8TB and not a single card can outperform any of my SSDs. I have yet to experience a single, sudden failure of any SSD and I have one that I got for free with 5% life on it. I have used it daily for 2 years and it still shows 5% life. I can't say that about any SD card. As a test of endurance, I torture all of my devices to torrenting. I have yet to find a single SD card that could handle it. I have SSD with over 400 TB written to them and they still have 99% life left. I don't even know why people are still discussing the benefits of SD cards when SSDs offer so much more for less cost at the larger sizes. Buying an SSD at smaller sizes is just plain stupid as you still have to pay for all of the hardware like case, controller, board before you figure nand chips. Amazon has gotten so cheap now with SSD that I only use eBay for some of the higher end SSD that most people don't bid over. Just ask for a SMART report if you're worried about endurance.
@@jamesbanday The only reason I can think of is boot speed for older Pis or using drives that don’t initialize fast enough for the Pi to recognize them as a boot drive. While a 32GB SSD was cheap at the time of the release of the video, it wasn’t always the case so I take slight offense to criticism of my choice of drive as drive choice wasn’t important for the video’s subject matter. That being said, if you have an idea for a better video on the subject and you like my delivery style, I’d be happy to collaborate to get something out.
Haha. I can't speak to every application, but there is a Pi hat on Amazon exactly for this so, it's a thing. It depends on the application and how fast you are doing through SD Cards. Just gives another option.
Absolutely yes, micro SD cards are fine for media storage, but they are not designed for running OS which continually reads and writes 4K files. While flash don't suffer from fragmentation slow downs like regular HDD, they also write to the flash differently. Due to the inherent quirks of how flash erases and writes data, write amplification is a serious threat to the P/E cycles of low quality nand used in cards and usb drives. I also only know of a handful of high end micro SD cards and USB drives with controllers that handles garbage collection. Every modern SSD has this feature now that is designed to restore the speed of the drive. Another thing to consider is the difference in latency of SSD and micro SD cards, the SSD has a latency 100x faster than a card so this is why apps load so much faster when using an SSD. I have some 512 GB premium micro SD cards with very impressive sequential read and write speeds, but they are still a joke in 4K read and write and latency when compared to an SSD. Anyone with some time to waste can find an amazing deal on eBay for a used SSD with plenty of life still left. I have drives with over 400 TB written that still have 99% of their rated life left. You won't find that in any card.
I’m trying this and I go through all the steps and it all looks good, but when I go to boot straight from the SSD nothing happens. The only difference I can see is the mountpoint. I see your mountpoint is blank where mine is /media/pi/boot for sda1 and media/pi/rootfs for sda2. When I do the resize I get a message that says: Filesystem at dev/sda2 is mounted to /media/pi/rootfs; on-line resizing required. I’ve reformatted the SSD 2-3 times, thrn loading FPP again, and it keeps coming up in the same mountpoint. Not sure what to do. Any help would be appreciated. EDIT: I went to a headless version of raspian and went through the entire process and I was able to get the same mountpoints, but still nothing when I try to boot from SSD. I even swapped the RPi 4 for a RPi 3 and same results. It doesn’t even get an IP address when booting from the SSD so I’m not able to even SSH into it.
I just realized I didn't show initializing the SSD. How are you doing that? Treat it like an SD card and copy the FPP image with Etcher or whatever you're using.
@@CanispaterChristmas when I boot up with just the SD card and use lsblk I get mmcblk0p1 256M /boot, and mmcblk0p2 29.5G /. I add the SSD card and sda1 256M and sda2 119G. Both mountpoints are blank.
@@michaeleckman3016 Plugging it in doesn't mount it, just makes it visible in lsblk. That's fine. But if you try booting without the SD Card, it doesn't boot?
Ok, thanks. I am just looking at starting into the hobby and getting a pi kit. love the videos! Oh, what was the class of sd card that you recommend? I know I saw it in previous video but can't remember which one :)
Haha. Space wasn't the issue. Longevity of the SD Card was and really just playing with it to see how well it worked. I do have a 128GB USB/SSD stick if that helps make you feel better. 😂
@@CanispaterChristmas thankx for the response...just wanted to know if there was some advantages that I'm not aware of..as you didn't really compare advantages or disadvantages...which I understand because it wasn't a comparison video..you also didn't mentioned longevity being the reason why you decided to on the ssd....so yeah I'm feel better.😂😁😘🤣👌🏼
@@CanispaterChristmas can you boot from an external HD using the pi 4 usb 3 slots..🤔 some y outube tutorials from a few months back was saying you couldn't..can't seem to find any updated info on this..
@@Cloud9MediaTv Hmm. Haven't tried it. My only 4 is now in service for the holidays so I'll need to get another one to play with. If I get a chance to try it, I'll let you know.
@@shawnwade302 The main bottleneck is the USB port. If you have a Pi4 with USB3 should perform better. Either way though, it's a hard drive vs an SD card.
Most useful comment ever. "This works automatically with the Pi3b+" It's amazing how one video invalidates hours of searching in mere minutes. Thanks bub. Good work.
Haha. Hope it working for you. 😂
hdd 3"1/2 you need power adaptor with usb 2.0/3.0/ide/sata.
hdd 2"1/2 just cable doesn't need power adptor with usb 2.0/3.0/ide/sata.
I am also using pi but my pi never detects 2.5 inch hard drive. Even the drive does not show up in pi.
Its been ages and I am still stuck at it.
I also searched many blogs they said you do need power for pi to detect hard drive, it is a low powered device and it will not detect the hard drive.
Previously it used to detect but now no more.
Whenever I plug the hard drive it shows
mmkblk0p.......122mb c fat32 (LBA) when my drive is 500gb
and till now I don't what is (LBA)
Also I would like to tell I forgot my pi pass and username, when I contacted pi.org they said just reinstall the os and it will not ask for pass and username. So I am using it in that way.
Right now I am using kali linux in pi.
@@jojogonjalves4137 Shadowwarrior82 is mostly right, but you have to look at a few things, the total power the PSU you are using outputs, whether the adapter your bought is USB3 or 2 because the USB 2 will max out at 500 mA while USB 3 will be able to use 900 mA. The third thing you need to look at is the total draw of the 2.5 in drive you are using. I have boxes of SSDs and some have very low power draw and some like the 2TB 850 Pro needs 2A to properly run. I also have multiple SATA to USB adapters and I once noticed that the USB 2 model wouldn't properly allow a few of my Enterprise SSD to show up. As for my USB 3 adapter, it works with most drives, but when I use a power hungry one, I use an external power source. For your problem, I think you should check your PSU, I don't think it's providing enough power to your board.
@@jamesbanday
Yeah you are right later I changed the usb charger and used a charger more than 2A and it worked.
But I was thinking of creating NAS with rpi3b+ and now I am stuck. I thought of connecting hdd through sata port but there is no sata port in rpi. I thought if its possible to connect to hard disk through sata and enclose in a case and make a nas.
@@jojogonjalves4137 You could, but I think you're overthinking the NAS. Yes it is possible to use a SATA to USB enclosure to create a NAS. Here's the instructions.
www.ionos.com/digitalguide/server/configuration/raspberry-pi-nas/
The problem you will run into is actually the enclosure itself as they are not all equal. In my experience, these media servers can run very hot and die prematurely if not properly cooled. I don't know where you plan to put it, but you don't need anything special, any of these enclosure will work just fine.
www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Drive-Docking-Station-DS-4SSD/dp/B0711L68MS/ref=sr_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=raid+enclosure&qid=1596014527&sr=8-6
You can even use something like this if you wanted.
www.amazon.com/12TB-Elements-Desktop-External-Drive/dp/B07VXKF1L4/ref=sr_1_37?dchild=1&keywords=external+hdd&qid=1596014939&refinements=p_n_feature_two_browse-bin%3A5446816011&rnid=562234011&s=electronics&sr=1-37
I personally don't like using one large device for everything. If you take a look at the 4 bay, non RAID enclosure, you will notice that you can access each drive individually if you wanted. I prefer this as that means multiple users streaming from the NAS don't overwhelm the phonographs you place in them. That means you can stream FLAC from one drive while someone else is streaming movies from a second drive while someone is uploading a Go Pro project to another drive. I don't know if you're aware, but the SATA interface only allows for reading or writing at one time so it has to queue things up and juggle constantly. PCIe is able to do both simultaneously, but that's a discussion for another time. By using multiple drives, you can now have multiple users use the NAS without fear of a slow down. I don't know how you want to set it up, but I prefer multiple drives. Since I use a lot of SSD, I tend to favor enclosures that supports UASP. You can read this article to understand why.
blog.startech.com/post/all-you-need-to-know-about-uasp/
Here is an article comparing the Pi3+ to Pi4. AS he will explain, having UASP support can really speed up your IOPS and access speeds. Pi3+ only has USB 2.0 and I can confirm that your throughput will be very limited.
www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/uasp-makes-raspberry-pi-4-disk-io-50-faster
This board on the other hand blows any Pi out of the water, it has a Hexa core Arm processor, using a big.little scheme, a slot for a micro SD card, eMMC and a PCIe m.2 NVME slot. This means you have at least 4 different ways to mount storage on this device. FYI, I don't recommend RockPi for beginners because it takes a little bit of knowledge to get an NVME running at full speed.
rockpi.org/rockpi4
Makes sense. Thanks!
Hey Jeff, just wanted to extend my personal gratitude to give me the courage to finally step into Smart Pixel Christmas Light Shows.....as for a number of years used a Mr.Christmas sequencer, but was always afraid to step into this world and you really helped a lot.
Thanks Robert! And Welcome! Be sure to check into the Wednesday night xLights call (see xlights.org). A lot of great into there and folks that can help you out live if you get stuck!
Lol, the opening made me smile.
Nice job.
Thanks!
Good Morning (well here is WA it's morning),
Your videos are great and have actually inspired me into thinking I would be able to pull off the RGB pixel light hobby. Going into this, I knew my biggest issues were going to be working with the computers, networking, and several programs. I've actually surprised myself in kinda working my way through everything. I've finally able to get my show (all 7 songs on two props) to play from the controller and from the FPP.
My final hang up is my Raspberry PI 4 is not connecting to my wifi. I have a new PI and it came in a kit from Cana Kit. I was able to load and configure my PI using the micro SD card that came with my kit. After configuring my PI, I pulled the micro SD card and used a "clean" card to load the FPP onto it. But for whatever reason, the FPP only works on eth0. I've configured the static IP addresses for both the eth0 and wlan0, but when I disconnect my ethernet cable, I lose all connectivity to the PI.
Do you have any suggestions?
Thanks in advance.
Not off the top of my head, but I'd suggest you call into the xLights Zoom room and have someone take a look at it live. I'm sure they can get you fixed up. Other than that, congratulations on putting that all together!
Thankyou so much Worked fantastic. My model was SanDisk SDSSDA 2.5 SSD Drive for anyone that has one.
Thanks! Glad it worked well!
Yep, that’ll hold a few sequences.
😂
There’s a guy who does benchmarks of this setup. The good ones are 3x faster than SD. The Transcend or the adapter are slow.
I think you're right, that small 32 GB Transcend is the first problem and the adapter may be the second problem. The limit may be the controller in the adapter or just the small, crappy nand used in the 32 GB Transcend. I have a 512 GB model and it's way faster due to parallelism.
Thanks!
God bless the people responsible for playback speed.
Haha!
Nop just a fail had to put my memory card back into boot again but thanks anyway it was worth a try my pi 3 is a bit long in the tooth so perhaps it time to get a pi 4
Hmmm. Yeah, might help. 😂
Hey Jeff, I have 2 questions about this. So since you plugged the ssd into the usb ports, could I just use a usb stick instead? And second, I ripped my sd card slot off my raspberry pi the other day on accident. So is there anyway to get the usb stick (If I can use it instead of a ssd) to work without putting an sd card in at the beginning? Thank you very much!
Booting from a USB stick is possible, but not all USB sticks work. I've had mixed results. You need some way to get the image onto the USB stick and make it bootable.
Something I learned, if you forgot to type sudo before the command you should be able to type sudo !!
And it will re-run the command with sudo privilege's
Interesting. Is that a "run the last command but as sudo" kind of thing?
What? No power wall video this week🥴. Patently waiting for the next chapter in that story. I enjoy your lighting video and they were a great resource last season
Thanks! They'll be back. I actually started one, but have to wait until this summer to finish it. Plus, I think some lighting folks take a bit of a break early in the year and I figured some might like the powerwall project. I mean, I think it's neat! LOL! I'm at the stage of processing the cells (video to come) which takes a lot of time so I went with the SSD video which was a quick win. Powerwall will be back next week. Learning a ton and having a blast so I hope that comes through. :)
Isn't the additional power socket for 12v for 3.5inch drives?
Possibly. I'm going to test that as soon as the Pi is done shredding an old array. Marketing used the USB3/2 example so I'm assuming it's more of a "you might need it, you might not" kind of thing. :)
I got a Sata ii SSD/USB adapter cable hooked up to my rpi4 with Buster10 32 bit. lsusb has it listed as detected. But I can't find the drive in Media menu so I can open it and view the files. What do feel the problem is?
Did you mount the drive using "mount"?
@@CanispaterChristmas I used G parted to format it to fat32. For that I had to dismount it.
OK. It will need to be mounted for you to see it. www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2014/05/how-to-mount-a-usb-flash-disk-on-the-raspberry-pi/
Good info for anyone needing storage. Would a large USB drive do the same?
The truth is; Jeff had a couple of Amazon gift cards from Christmas, and HAD to spend them NOW!!!
Burning a hole in my pocket. LOL! FAT format has a limit of 32GB, but you can write a stretch image so no real limit. Now that you ask, I'll try my 500GB mechanical drive once the Pi finishes erasing an old array in about a week!
Cost becomes a factor the higher you go. You reach a point of higher capacity SSD being cheaper than the same or lower capacity SD Card.
I know you've probably already decided the answer, but I'm writing this for any who happens to have the same question. I've tested dozens upon dozens of micro SD, TF, USB, SSD and the advertised sequential transfer speed is irrelevant for OS usage. Latency and 4K read speeds are much more important. SSD have much better controllers than any of the other USB devices out there, I have some of the fastest USB drives on the planet and they are still slower than an SSD in a USB enclosure. Endurance also comes into play when you consider how the controller on USB vs SSD behaves. Garbage collection is terrible on USB flash drives as they were meant for short term storage and not running an OS. You also benefit from parallelism on SSD as you tend to have more nand chips spread out across more lanes to create a "RAID" that increases read and write speeds. Most USB drives have a single, low quality nand package. Another benefit of SSD is the onboard DRAM cache that can greatly enhance performance. If you fully want all of the benefits of an SSD, you must ensure the adapter or enclosure is UASP compliant. If for some reason you must use a USB drive, the cheapest and fastest one I've found is the 128 GB drive from Micro Center, it was the only value drive to use MLC nand from a respected manufacturer. It was much faster than either of the SanDisk or Samsung I owned and they were the fastest ones advertised at the time of purchase. As for the limits of FAT32, it isn't 32 GB, FAT 32 can be used up to 2 TB, it is only Windows that artificially imposes a 32 GB size so it can promote the use of exfat. Any third party app will be able to format FAT32 to any size up to 2TB. As for the FAT32 used for Raspbian, only the boot partition is formatted in FAT32, the rest of the drive is actually formatted in EXT4, the native file system of Linux. The same thing happens in Windows, if anyone bothers to look, there's a small, FAT32 partition for just booting, but the rest of the partition is NTFS. I have no idea how this misinformation about FAT32 being limited to 32 GB persist, especially with all of these experts with RUclips channels.
Hey Jeff hope all is well, can you power the pii off of the usb port on the falcon?
David says "not enough power." :) The Pi is a surprisingly high load and more if you add any peripherals to the USB ports. When I first started playing with one, Falcon Player couldn't find the USB card because the supply that came with it wasn't big enough. I have a 2.5-amp wall wort on my Amazon page that works great. He didn't say how much the USB port delivers, but not enough for a Pi. Excellent question though! Thanks!
@@CanispaterChristmas That's to bad , it would have made it easy . Thanks for asking for me.
Does this work with woa(windows on arm)? Thank you in advance for the reply.
No idea, but I didn't have to load any special drivers for it. I suspect it would behave like other USB thumb drives. Have you tried other thumb drives?
@@CanispaterChristmas i havent yet
Why would you go with only a 32 ssd when you could get a 32gb as card?
Haha. SD Card longevity can be an issue depending on the application. Like I say in the video, not needed for Falcon Player, but I could see where it might solve a problem for anything that does a lot of writes. Really just playing with the technology a little.
CanispaterChristmas gotchu. Love the video👍🏼
You can get a Pi 4 w/4GB now! Therefore you can hold more App's on internal memory. With a fan on it will last until Pi's come with 64GB! Gotcha too.
- Watchmen
@@timothyvaher2421 WOW! Excellent timing! I was just about to get another 3B+.
Is it possible to have both the SD card and USB inserted and then be able to choose between the two at boot?
I haven't tried it but you might be able to use something like BerryBoot for that.
@@CanispaterChristmas BerryBoot can't boot android systems unfortunately. I'd need to convert the img to squashfs and there are no clear instructions on how to do that for and android img.
Ah. Yeah, no experience there, but I see a ton of articles on how to run it. Assuming you are trying to do something specific since it appears RPi and Android seem to work together.
@@CanispaterChristmas I've managed to install Android but I want to dual boot with an retro gaming OS but it doesn't seem possible.
Just use berryboot , it make you install on the ssd
Ah cool! Does Berryboot work in headless mode?
Have you tested this on the new PI4
Honestly, I don't think I tested with this exact setup, but the concept works. I used a Pi4 to run my lights this past year and it had a USB SATA drive and no SD card. I don't remember if I had to go through all the command line hoops in the video because I think the 4 can boot from USB by default as long as the drive is compatible. I have some USB drives that don't work because they take too long to initialize and the Pi has already moved on, but I have drives that work fine and some work half the time so you may need to experiment a little.
I appreciate all of your videos, and intend to setup my first pixel display for christmas 2019. I've purchased a falcon F48, 1,000 pixels, I have a dozen rpi's laying around, and server power supplies.
I'm a long time linux admin, and think I'd probably approach this slightly differently. Instead of booting off the SSD directly, I'd probably just boot off the sdcard, then run fdisk/e2fsck on the SSD.. once complete it, mount it to /home/fpp/media, and add it to fstab so it remounts on boot. Actually, it's identical to how FPP mounts a thumb drive if you decided to use one. This gives you a fully supported FPP booting off the SD card, but also gets you the reliability and speed of an SSD for the majority of the files/data you'd use with fpp.
Thanks! and Welcome! Yeah, this isn't really needed for FPP, but I highly recommend using some sort of USB drive for FPP media. It's great that it can be on the SD card more easily now as the upload performance is better. However, one re-image and you've got to upload everything again. Not so with a USB drive. This video was a result of my YouTubing and thought it was a cool idea for some applications that do a lot of writes. I've have an image for something else that includes an influx DB so assume that would go through a card pretty quickly. :)
@@CanispaterChristmas absolutely agree. I have fpp setup with a USB thumb drive, but also the fpp media directory is backed up daily using borgbackup. Anyway, keep up the awesome videos. they are hugely helpful!
Ah. borgbackup looks interesting.
Can you explain the benefits of booting off of the card vs booting directly from the SSD? Many people online have used this method and I can't seem to find any real benefit for it. Why would you want your boot partition on a device that can easily become corrupted during a power loss? Why mess with the card at all if you don't have to? SSDs have come down in price so much, I don't even understand why people are still using micro SD cards for the Pi. I can understand if you have a Pi Zero with a ROM you don't plan to interact too much with, but for a daily driver, I will take the reliability of an SSD any day over any micro SD card. I have cards from 32-512 GB and SSD from 128GB-8TB and not a single card can outperform any of my SSDs. I have yet to experience a single, sudden failure of any SSD and I have one that I got for free with 5% life on it. I have used it daily for 2 years and it still shows 5% life. I can't say that about any SD card. As a test of endurance, I torture all of my devices to torrenting. I have yet to find a single SD card that could handle it. I have SSD with over 400 TB written to them and they still have 99% life left. I don't even know why people are still discussing the benefits of SD cards when SSDs offer so much more for less cost at the larger sizes. Buying an SSD at smaller sizes is just plain stupid as you still have to pay for all of the hardware like case, controller, board before you figure nand chips. Amazon has gotten so cheap now with SSD that I only use eBay for some of the higher end SSD that most people don't bid over. Just ask for a SMART report if you're worried about endurance.
@@jamesbanday The only reason I can think of is boot speed for older Pis or using drives that don’t initialize fast enough for the Pi to recognize them as a boot drive. While a 32GB SSD was cheap at the time of the release of the video, it wasn’t always the case so I take slight offense to criticism of my choice of drive as drive choice wasn’t important for the video’s subject matter. That being said, if you have an idea for a better video on the subject and you like my delivery style, I’d be happy to collaborate to get something out.
With 128gb SD cards under $20 is putting an SSD drive on a pi necessary?
Haha. I can't speak to every application, but there is a Pi hat on Amazon exactly for this so, it's a thing. It depends on the application and how fast you are doing through SD Cards. Just gives another option.
large retropie images ;)
Absolutely yes, micro SD cards are fine for media storage, but they are not designed for running OS which continually reads and writes 4K files. While flash don't suffer from fragmentation slow downs like regular HDD, they also write to the flash differently. Due to the inherent quirks of how flash erases and writes data, write amplification is a serious threat to the P/E cycles of low quality nand used in cards and usb drives. I also only know of a handful of high end micro SD cards and USB drives with controllers that handles garbage collection. Every modern SSD has this feature now that is designed to restore the speed of the drive. Another thing to consider is the difference in latency of SSD and micro SD cards, the SSD has a latency 100x faster than a card so this is why apps load so much faster when using an SSD. I have some 512 GB premium micro SD cards with very impressive sequential read and write speeds, but they are still a joke in 4K read and write and latency when compared to an SSD. Anyone with some time to waste can find an amazing deal on eBay for a used SSD with plenty of life still left. I have drives with over 400 TB written that still have 99% of their rated life left. You won't find that in any card.
@@jamesbanday Thanks for the insightful reply. Great info.
What's the secret for your abundant hair?
Im getting bald at 32 yo :(
Great video!
Haha! Thanks! Great genes I suppose. Dad had a full head of hair when he passed. Balding just means you're a manley man! :)
I’m trying this and I go through all the steps and it all looks good, but when I go to boot straight from the SSD nothing happens. The only difference I can see is the mountpoint. I see your mountpoint is blank where mine is /media/pi/boot for sda1 and media/pi/rootfs for sda2. When I do the resize I get a message that says: Filesystem at dev/sda2 is mounted to /media/pi/rootfs; on-line resizing required.
I’ve reformatted the SSD 2-3 times, thrn loading FPP again, and it keeps coming up in the same mountpoint. Not sure what to do. Any help would be appreciated.
EDIT: I went to a headless version of raspian and went through the entire process and I was able to get the same mountpoints, but still nothing when I try to boot from SSD. I even swapped the RPi 4 for a RPi 3 and same results. It doesn’t even get an IP address when booting from the SSD so I’m not able to even SSH into it.
I just realized I didn't show initializing the SSD. How are you doing that? Treat it like an SD card and copy the FPP image with Etcher or whatever you're using.
@@CanispaterChristmas yes, I used Etcher with the latest FPP img.
Try booting without the SSD connected and see what the SD Card is called. Then add the SSD and see what it's assigned.
@@CanispaterChristmas when I boot up with just the SD card and use lsblk I get mmcblk0p1 256M /boot, and mmcblk0p2 29.5G /.
I add the SSD card and sda1 256M and sda2 119G. Both mountpoints are blank.
@@michaeleckman3016 Plugging it in doesn't mount it, just makes it visible in lsblk. That's fine. But if you try booting without the SD Card, it doesn't boot?
what ps did you upgrade to for the pi?
A little 5V 3A supply I got off Amazon I believe. I've had it a while. The 2.5A wall worts work fine tho.
Ok, thanks. I am just looking at starting into the hobby and getting a pi kit. love the videos! Oh, what was the class of sd card that you recommend? I know I saw it in previous video but can't remember which one :)
High endurance - usually used in dash cams.
Always good tubes. I’ll be destroying a couple of Pi 😂😂😂 I got plenty of them.
Destroying? You don't need to destroy any to do this. lol!
Jarrad Leaver tongue in cheek mate. But an interesting thing to do. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve bricked a pi messing around with them.
You know, now that you mention it, I think I've only bricked one myself and it was an older model. I just figured it needed replacing anyway. LOL!
👍
Haha. I've rewatched that video a few times myself. 😂
@@CanispaterChristmas Its scary how much I forget about displays and sequencing from Christmas to Christmas! lol
why buy a sad 32gb when you can buy a 64gb or 128gb sd🤔
Haha. Space wasn't the issue. Longevity of the SD Card was and really just playing with it to see how well it worked. I do have a 128GB USB/SSD stick if that helps make you feel better. 😂
@@CanispaterChristmas thankx for the response...just wanted to know if there was some advantages that I'm not aware of..as you didn't really compare advantages or disadvantages...which I understand because it wasn't a comparison video..you also didn't mentioned longevity being the reason why you decided to on the ssd....so yeah I'm feel better.😂😁😘🤣👌🏼
Oh! Speed vs size. No. The Pi's USB port will be the limiting factor here. Should see a speed increase with the Pi4 since it has the faster USB ports.
@@CanispaterChristmas can you boot from an external HD using the pi 4 usb 3 slots..🤔 some y outube tutorials from a few months back was saying you couldn't..can't seem to find any updated info on this..
@@Cloud9MediaTv Hmm. Haven't tried it. My only 4 is now in service for the holidays so I'll need to get another one to play with. If I get a chance to try it, I'll let you know.
Only 32 gig ssd?
Haha. Didn't need a larger one for the demo.
@@CanispaterChristmas fair enough. I want to try the same thing with a 1TB ssd.
@@shawnwade302 The main bottleneck is the USB port. If you have a Pi4 with USB3 should perform better. Either way though, it's a hard drive vs an SD card.
@@CanispaterChristmas what about a PCIe ssd?
I want about 500GB of emulation roms and even if using USB to sata ssd, its still faster than any sd card right?
Thank you sir.
👍
My sd-card died today. Thats why I probably get an ssd.
Ah. Been there. This setup worked for me. Let me know how it goes.
Is your last name really Christmas?
No. 😀