I’ve scoured the web and this forum for an answer to my question and came up empty. So apologies if this is answered elsewhere.
I have a 1GB m.2 SATA SSD that I would like to BOTH use as my Pi boot drive as well as the file storage for my media files (eg music, pictures, video). Right now, all those files are on my Windows 10 box. I’m hoping I can set up a bootable Pi image on a small partition on the SSD and then create a second, larger partition for the files. I then want to be able to pull the drive from my Pi and connect it to Windows so that I can occasionally update the drive with new content, then plug it back in the Pi, boot and run Raspbian.
Before I go formatting things and taking the time to transfer >500GB of data to the SSD, however, I wanted to make sure I could do it and how I would do it.
I think I would create one bootable FAT partition on the SSD and flash the Raspbian image into that partition. I would then create a non-bootable NTFS partition that I would keep my files in. I think when I plugged the drive into a running copy of Windows, it would ignore the bootable partition and just show me the NTFS partition. Then, when I put it in my Pi, it would boot into Raspbian using the boot partition and I could mount the NTFS partition to see all my media files.
Is that correct? Is the setup best done through Raspbian or in Windows or does it not matter? How large should the boot partition be? Or can I first plug the new SSD drive into my Pi, flash Raspbian onto it, then plug that into my Windows box and create a new NTFS partition out of the remaining space? Or will the flashing process create an ext4 partition to eat up the remaining SSD space and I’ll have to then reformat that to NTFS?
Thanks so much for any help, I truly appreciate it!
Stu
ext4
which Windows can't (actually won't) read. These are not insurmountable obstacles if you want to proceed, but this requires an understanding of the limitations - not a Pi problem. You CAN access NTFS partitions in Linux, but don't expect stellar performance.