Why SSD drives just to USB boot? A little bit faster and a lot more stable.
Why a more stable raspberry pi?
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After following several tutorials which failed along with thousands of line of code dedicated to automating the setup for USB boot from a sata drive [transferring or cloning from an SD card] it felt like duty to write a quick post. I hope this saves someone time, perhaps frustration, and certainly as in my own case, feeling silly for having not started with this obvious approach.
After all the ‘USB boot on Ubuntu 21.4 server with a raspberry pi 4’– + similar, tutorials and scripts all failed, I thought about it and… Eureka! I plugged it in. I just flashed the image directly to my drive via USB. After trying lots of cables I found that using one of the USB 180° male – male adapters to connect to the drive worked with most other combinations.
Then just flash it like you would an sd card, configure system-boot just like an sd card and boot with only the usb connection to the drive [no sd card].
I haven’t tested with other images or pi’s [only pi 4 64bit ubuntu 21.04 image for raspi]– as this is ancillary to my task at hand, but I certainly would try this before what seem like incredibly silly methods in retrospect from tutorials I came across.
https://ubuntu.com/download/raspberry-pi
THIS TYPE TAKES MORE WORK
Not a lot more work, but some. Here flash ssd drive and sd card and connect or insert them both. Then ssh to the device and do a full update and upgrade. If you want to really dig in see the documentation at:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2711_bootloader_config.md
Or just sudo apt install raspi-config and then enter the interface sudo raspi-config and you’ll find the bootloader options under ‘advanced’ sub menu. Select boot usb first and reboot into your ssd drive as root system. —
