I would like to know, if it is possible to use a SSD as the only drive for a Raspberry PI.
The reason is, I would like to use it as database- and webserver and I am not sure about the lifetime of SD-cards.
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Sign up to join this communityAnother option could be to use an alternative to the Raspberry Pi with an SATA-interface, like the Cubieboard (see this list on Wikipedia).
On the other hand, SD cards are not as unreliable as you might think.
You can boot from the SD card then just use an attached SSD, but you can not get around using the SD card for booting.
Once booted you can make the SD card read only and make sure all the software etc is running of the SSD
cmdline.txt
contains root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4
indicating the root partition.
I assume that if you used a SSD
with a suitable partition you could use root=/dev/sda1
(or whatever). I have not tried this (and don't share the paranoia many seem to have about using SDCARDS).
It is not clear whether Raspbian contains the SSD
trim support needed to ensure reasonable lifetime on a SSD
.
It would be interesting to see if this works. I might even give it a go with a HD.
discard
option to enable it.
/etc/fstab
on the HD from /dev/mmcblk0p2 / ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1
to the new device
Mar 28, 2014 at 11:52
2020 answer:
As of recently (June 2020) booting from USB is out of "beta" but hasn't been announced as officially supported. Read all about it here