the SD card on my Raspberry Pi ran out
of space so I got a bigger one
hi welcome to Canispator Christmas all
right so I had seen a video about
hooking up a solid-state hard drive to a
Raspberry Pi now where you know this
might be interesting is if you are just
burning through SD cards for whatever
the application is I wanted to find out
if a solid-state drive was a viable
option and so I bought this 32 gig
solid-state drive off Amazon it's a
transcend and then I bought this little
adapter WEme? WEme? so this is just a
SATA to USB adapter it's also got a AC
adapter plug in here so I think USB 3
works fine with just the cable USB 2 may
need the extra power supply I guess it
also depends on what you're plugging it
into what the power supply is running on
your device now I'm running Raspberry Pi
so a lot of times when you buy one of
those the power supply that comes with
it is just barely enough to run the PI
and if you start adding peripherals in
there then it kind of has a problem so
now I've got a bigger power supply for
mine so it's it's not an issue so that's
that's all it is it's just a solid-state
drive and you're using it as a USB
external drive on the PI there is a lot
of command line stuff to get this to
actually work so with an SD card
you can expand the file system to use
the entire SD card you can't do that
with this because that it only works
with SD cards so you have to do it
manually and you have to go into Fdisk
and delete and create a new partition
and then run a resize command it's not
super complicated but if you're not
comfortable with doing that kind of
low-level stuff then then stay away from
it you its this is not required this is
just something I wanted to play with
because I thought it was kind of a neat
idea and wanted to check it out so I'll
go through and initialize this on my
laptop and then I'll connect it up to
the Raspberry Pi and see you know make
sure that the pie boots without an SD
card just just with this connected up to
it and then I will expand the file
system so that it can use the entire
drive all of that is pretty generic
Linux stuff so any application that you
have that you might need this for
that'll still apply and then the final
piece will just be Falcon Player and so
that's more specific to my application
but this should apply to anything that
does a lot of writes I'm not saying that
you need to do this for Falcon Player
I've got SD cards that have lasted for
years it does not chew up SD cards so
you don't need to do this it's just
Uber geek stuff probably also not going
to be supported by the developers of
Falcon Player so don't get me in trouble
and start asking them a bunch of
questions while your solid state hard
drive doesn't work with Falcon Player.
alright this cable it just has the SATA
connector and a USB connector we have a
solid-state drive here with the same
kind of connector can you see that and
we just want to match up the short end
and the long end there we go we're ready
to plug it into the computer and format
it so let's erase this don't really care
what it's called
Master Boot Record we want FAT
we want
and Master Boot Record we will hit erase.
so details everything looked good OK
we're done
so now we have a fat32 formatted
32 gigabyte Drive so I'm going to put
the Falcon Player image onto it that's a
Raspberry Pi image with Stretch and some
application files for Falcon Player but
it's really this thing you could write
noobs to it or really whatever you
wanted to
okay so let's exit out of this open up
Etcher
select the image Pi 2.5, select the
drive that's the 32 gig er and we will
flash I'll type my [password] and we're flashing
flash complete okay now we can remove it
from the computer and put it into the
Raspberry Pi OK this is the setup
I have the solid-state drive here cable
coming out here going back into here I
have no SD card in there I've got an
Ethernet cable plugged in, HDMI plugged
in and then this is the power connector
so if we power up the unit and
everything works what you'll see is this
little light will come on the light
right there the hard drive light will
come on but we don't see anything this
is a pi/3 B not a pi/3 B+ so we've got
to put an SD card in there get into the
operating system and make one little
change let me get set up for that and
I'll show you that so the setup is we
have a Raspberry Pi booted up into
Stretch with the SD card we also have
the solid state drive plugged into the
USB port doesn't really matter at this
point but it's in there so what we're
going to do is execute this command its
echo program USB boot mode equals one
and we're going to add that to the boot
config so if you look do that so this we
should find the boot config and let's do
a cat
boot config and there it is at the
bottom program USB boot mode equals one
the Raspberry Pi 3 B plus is able to
boot from USB without any changes but
the Raspberry Pi 3 B requires the USB
boot bit to be set in the one-time
programmable memory so this is a
commitment folks you can't go back once
you do this you can't go back and all it
means is that if you have a bootable USB
Drive in there and no SD card then it'll
boot from the USB Drive if you have an
SD card in there that still takes
priority and that will still boot all
right so let's reboot and let's fry that
fuse okay we have rebooted now we need
to execute this command to make sure
that it did its job and it's vcgencmd
otp_dump pipe
that to grep 17 and we get 3020000a
which means that the bit is now set
so now we should be able to shut down
this pi pull out the SD card and boot
from the SSD if all goes well and we can
shut down I will pull out the SD card
and put it aside so we'd have no SD card
all we got is this SSD plugged into the
PI alright so now let's fire it back up
and see if it works
Hey! that looks good and it looks like
we're booting so we just powered off
let's put the SD card back in because we
do want to boot with that but we also
want this connected this time because
we're going to expand this filesystem so
power on so execute LSBLK to get all
the block devices so you see we have
we're booted from this disk which is the
SD card and then this is the hard drive
that we have plugged in and just to
verify that it's partitioned it with a
43.8 meg boot partition and then a three
gig drive partition so we want to
increase this to close to 32 gig we do a
sudo fdisk /dev/sda and there we are so if
we print the current partition we have
this fat partition which is not really
sure what that it may be that's a
bootloader and then this is the one we
want to change so
so the first thing we want to do is
delete this second partition I know it
sounds scary
so we deleted it so we do a new primary
and we're gonna default to to the first
sector let's just copy this 98 304 98
304 and the last one is going to be
whatever the last one is so this Drive
that has 62 533 296 sectors and 62 533
295 is the last sector so I'll just hit
enter we created a second partition
it'll be ext4 yes we know we don't want
to remove the signature and then we need
to write this partition table so now we
need to reboot it all right let's do an
LSBLK again just to verify that's
29.8 gig now so we want to resize FS dev
SDA2 - and
I bet I need to do this
okay
there we go it will take a few minutes
well it's resizing the hard drive light
is blinking all right so now we should
be able to shut down when it halt it let
me remove the SD card and now we just
have this let's turn it back on now
let's see if she boots with the SSD
fully resized so if I hit that with a
browser it looks like it is working so
now we can go in and configure Falken
just like we do normally when we're
using an SD card that's awesome so I did
a quick performance test coming in at
the slowest was a thumb drive at 2
minutes and 28 seconds then the SSD at 2
minutes and 9 seconds and then not
surprising the SD card at 1 minute 46
seconds ok so it works I'm happy that I
had a little experiment that came out on
the positive side I'm going to run this
for a while I'm just gonna basically
just have it run a show for a while and
see how that does I'll also be updating
the the sequences and adding songs and
that kind of stuff but mainly just
having it run and see what it does see
if it runs into any issues so I'll let
you know how that goes in the Articles
that I was looking at there may be some
compatibility issues with some
solid-state drives some of them may not
come up fast enough for the the
Raspberry Pi to recognize them there may
be some other issues that I don't know
about I don't know if I just got lucky
with this or if it's you know works
better now not really sure this one I
tried and
this one worked so I will have a link to
this on my Amazon page I'll also link to
this adapter on my Amazon page and if
it's something you want to try out these
work for me I'm not an expert in this I
haven't you know this is what I've tried
so this works for me I won't be much
help if you have questions about other
solid-state drives so but if you want to
try it out try it out I think it's kind
of a cool idea that being said if you
have any questions leave them below
other than that thanks for watching and
I'll see you again soon
