OverviewPI + UbuntuUbuntu on PIBuying external ssd

Create Bootable Drive

Creating your bootable drive is also very easy. You simply image it the same way you would image a blank MicroSD.

I use Win32DiskImager and simply select the USB attached drive just like you would with a MicroSD card and write the image. It’s very easy!

Don’t forget to place an empty “ssh” file in the /boot directory if you want to connect via SSH.

SSD With Raspberry Pi 4

The Raspberry Pi 4 did not originally support USB booting at launch unlike the previous Pi 3 models did. This is because they actually added a physical EEPROM firmware storage chip into the board. Due to this I previously published a workaround for how to set up USB booting using a SD card as a bootloader.

Fortunately the native support has finally been released for USB booting on the Pi 4. I cover how to upgrade to the new firmware and enable native USB booting extensively in my new Raspberry Pi 4 USB Booting Guide (recommended).

If you aren’t sure which SSD / storage adapter to get I have an extensive guide available here: Raspberry Pi 4 / 400 Storage Adapter Guide

https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-4-ubuntu-20-04-usb-mass-storage-boot-guide/

Raspberry Pi 4 / 400 Ubuntu USB Mass Storage Boot Guide

Published: December 4, 2020 / Last Modified: September 8, 2021 / Linux, Raspberry Pi, Storage / 294 Comments

Ubuntu Server 20.04 + Raspberry Pi

Official support from Canonical for the Raspberry Pi has come a long way. We can now install officially supported Ubuntu on the Pi! In my previous guide for Ubuntu 18.04 on the Pi the Raspberry Pi was not officially supported yet and to be honest the experience was pretty janky.

The previous LTS “unofficial” release had so many problems I actually rolled my own image with dozens of fixes to common ailments before I quickly realized that maintaining a Linux distro, even in such a limited capacity as patching in and distributing fixed binaries, was a monumental undertaking.

Fortunately the current Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release is officially certified for the Raspberry Pi. This combined with Ubuntu’s full 64 bit userland/system environment allows you to take full advantage of the 8 GB Pi’s memory without per-process 3GB memory limits (very useful if you are doing something like running a Minecraft server and want to allocate almost all of the 8 GB to it) means there has never been a better time to give Ubuntu a try on the Pi.

This guide takes it a step further and shows you how to get Ubuntu 20.04 / 20.10 / 21.04 / etc. working with a SSD. Let’s get started!

Equipment Used

Kingston A400 2.5″ SATA SSD

The Kingston A400 has been a great drive to use with the Pi for years. It’s reliable, widely available around the world, has low power requirements and performs very well. It’s also very affordable. This drive has been benchmarked over 1000 times at pibenchmarks.com and is the #1 most popular SSD among the Pi community!

Links: AliExpress.com*, Amazon.ae*, Amazon.ca*, Amazon.com*, Amazon.com.au*, Amazon.com.mx*, Amazon.co.jp*, Amazon.co.uk*, Amazon.de*, Amazon.es*, Amazon.fr*, Amazon.in*, Amazon.it*, Amazon.nl*, Amazon.pl*, Amazon.sa*, Amazon.se*, Amazon.sg*

StarTech 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0/3.1 Adapter

Both the USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 variants of the StarTech 2.5″ SATA adapter work well with the Pi 4. I’ve used the 3.0 variant with my Pi 4 since launch and it has always worked well. I later bought the 3.1 variant and had the same positive experience. These two adapter variants are my go to adapters for all my Pi related projects that need a fast and easy 2.5″ SATA SSD!

Links: Amazon.ae*, Amazon.ca*, Amazon.com*, Amazon.com.au*, Amazon.com.mx*, Amazon.co.jp*, Amazon.co.uk*, Amazon.de*, Amazon.es*, Amazon.fr*, Amazon.in*, Amazon.it*, Amazon.nl*, Amazon.pl*, Amazon.sa*, Amazon.se*, Amazon.sg*

NVME Option (powered USB hub required, see “Power Requirements” section in my more generalized Raspberry Pi 4 USB booting guide):

Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe SSD

The Samsung 970 EVO Plus is a fantastic drive and has fallen in price substantially. It’s widely available around the world. The smaller capacities (such as the 250GB version) of this drive are perfect for the Pi! This is the top performance option without going into the “Pro” series of the lineup which are much more expensive.

ASUS ROG Strix M.2 NVMe Enclosure

If you really want to take things over the top the ASUS Rog Strix M.2 NVMe enclosure uses the latest USB 3.2 Gen2 specification, is RGB capable and works with the Pi! Unsurprisingly, adding the extra lighting does take extra power! A powered USB hub is also required for this enclosure. More widely available than the ICY BOX but tends to be on the expensive side.

Prerequisites

Verify Power Supply Size (3.5A strongly recommended)

Check your Raspberry Pi’s power supply size and make sure it is delivering at least 3.5A. There are a lot of USB C adapters for the Raspberry Pi that are only 3.0A. These will typically work fine, until you plug in something like a SSD which draws power from the Pi and there is nothing left to give.

Most SSDs are quite power efficient but HDDs draw significantly more. Older generations of SSDs used quite a bit more power than newer ones as well. If you are using an older drive or a drive that you know is power hungry you need to pay extra attention to having a quality power source with plenty of capacity.

A good alternative option to relying on the Pi to power the drive is using a powered USB hub* so your drive doesn’t need to draw power from the Pi’s limited power budget. Make sure you get one that is compatible with the Pi as some powered USB hubs won’t work properly with it so check the reviews and do your research to make sure people are using it successfully with the Pi.

Using a 3.5A power supply* or powered USB hub* will ensure your drive is getting enough power without impacting the Pi’s stability.

Verify Storage Adapter Compatibility

You will need a USB 3.0 storage adapter. See my other article on USB booting not specific to Ubuntu for a lot more details on the storage adapters!

Get Latest Raspbian & Updates

To update your bootloader / firmware you should use Raspbian on a SD card. Right now support in third party operating systems to do anything with the new Raspberry Pi 4’s firmware or bootloader is very limited / nonexistent. You can use a third party operating system later once you set the boot mode, but to actually make these changes we will use official Raspbian.

First make sure that you have the absolute latest updates and firmware for the Pi. To upgrade all your packages and firmware to the latest version use the following command:

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y

Once the update has completed restart your Pi with a sudo reboot command to apply the latest firmware / kernel updates.

Verify EEPROM Bootloader is up to date

We can check if your Pi’s bootloader firmware is up to date with the following command:

sudo rpi-eeprom-update

If your Raspbian is very out of date you may not have this utility and can install it using:

sudo apt install rpi-eeprom

The output from rpi-eeprom-update will look like this if you are not up to date:

BCM2711 detected
VL805 firmware in bootloader EEPROM
*** UPDATE AVAILABLE ***
BOOTLOADER: update available
CURRENT: Thu 3 Sep 12:11:43 UTC 2020 (1599135103)
LATEST: Tue 24 Nov 15:08:04 UTC 2020 (1606230484)
FW DIR: /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/beta
VL805: up-to-date
CURRENT: 000138a1
LATEST: 000138a1

If it says any updates are available they be installed manually by adding ‘-a’ to the end of our previous command like this:

sudo rpi-eeprom-update -a

After the updates finish installing restart your Pi as firmware updates will not be applied until after a reboot. Now if you run rpi-eeprom-update to check for updates again it should say you are on the latest and up to date!

Changing rpi-eeprom’s Release Channel

Note: As of February 16th the firmware available in the “critical” branch is new enough to USB boot so I no longer recommend changing this. One reader even let me know in the comments that on the “stable” channel his storage was getting corrupted prompting a full reinstall!

By default you will only receive updates from Raspbian’s “critical” channel. This is a very conservative firmware update channel that will only give you very well tested firmware updates that are considered critical fixes for the device. Another channel that is available is “stable”.

Carlos and other commenters have reported that the current “critical” firmware didn’t work for them and they had to upgrade to the “stable” channel.

To switch to the stable channel we are going to edit the file /etc/default/rpi-eeprom-update:

sudo nano /etc/default/rpi-eeprom-update

Change the line FIRMWARE_RELEASE_STATUS=”critical” to:

FIRMWARE_RELEASE_STATUS="stable"

Now you can run sudo rpi-eeprom-update and you should see a new update available.

Install Ubuntu on USB Storage Device

The new official Raspberry Pi imaging tool is really good. It’s available on Windows, Linux and MacOS and is a small and fast download. It also works fine on most USB mass storage devices like SSDs. Since Ubuntu is now officially supported the image itself is also available in this tool which saves you the trouble of having to find and download the right image files.

64 bit images are recommended for the Pi 4 for better performance but the 32 bit images work as well.

If you want to do things the traditional way you can download the image from the main Ubuntu site and write it yourself using Etcher / dd / Win32diskimager / your preferred tool and skip to the next section. It’s recommended to create the media with the Raspberry Pi Imager unless you are having problems with that utility or are using this as a troubleshooting step.

Once you’ve downloaded the tool run it as administrator/sudo to avoid permission errors. To run the utility from the command line is usually sudo rpi-imager. You’ll be greeted with this screen:

Raspberry Pi Imager – Main Menu

Next click the “Choose OS” button:

Raspberry Pi Imager – OS Menu

Ahh, the benefits of being officially supported! Ubuntu is right there on the list waiting for us. Select the Ubuntu option and you will get the different choices of flavors/architectures. There’s Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, and Ubuntu Core in various forms of 64-bit (arm64) and 32-bit (armhf).

If you want to use the out-of-the-box Ubuntu Desktop edition you need to use the 64 bit Ubuntu 20.10 image as they never made a 20.04 desktop version for some reason. This really isn’t usually a big deal though because you can always choose the “Server” version and install Ubuntu’s desktop environment later with:

sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop

Once you’ve selected the edition you want go ahead and pick the “Choose SD Card” option and write the image. Despite not being a SD card my USB mass storage devices showed up anyway (writing the guide I used a StarTech adapter and a Kingston A400 SSD).

I’m sure some of you will manage to find unusual devices and configurations that may not show up in this tool. It doesn’t appear to show “fixed drives” that are physically installed in your machine. Regardless if it is causing a headache you may need to do it the old fashioned way and download the image from the main Ubuntu site and write the image using your favorite imaging tool instead.

Modifying Ubuntu for USB Booting

We need to make some changes to the Ubuntu drive we just created before we boot from it. Make sure your Pi is powered on and booted into Raspbian then plug in your newly imaged Ubuntu drive. We are going to make the changes using the Pi.

Find and Mount Storage Device

First let’s find your storage device using the command:

lsblk

This will show you all the storage devices attached to your system:

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda           8:0    0 119.2G  0 disk 
├─sda1        8:1    0   256M  0 part 
└─sda2        8:2    0   2.8G  0 part 
mmcblk0     179:0    0  59.5G  0 disk 
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1    0   256M  0 part /boot
└─mmcblk0p2 179:2    0  59.2G  0 part /

Your SD card will always start with mmcblk so you can rule that one out. That leaves sda as the only other disk device on the system. This will be the same for most of you but depending on what type of drive and storage adapter you use this can vary. You can substitute whatever yours is in place of /dev/sda in these instructions going forward. If yours is sdb use /dev/sdb. If it’s nvme0 use /dev/nvme0, etc.

In my output under the “MOUNTPOINT” column you can see it is blank. This means the drive isn’t mounted on my system. My mmcblk0p1 mountpoint though is not blank and is “/boot” as an example of a non-blank mountpoint. If you are using the full “Desktop” version of Raspbian it may have automatically mounted your drive and created 2 shortcuts on your desktop that will take you to the files. If your mountpoint is not blank and has something like /media/pi/writable go ahead and unmount them now using the following commands substituting the mountpoint listed for your drive:

sudo umount /media/pi/writable
sudo umount /media/pi/system-boot

Now we are going to create two mountpoints and mount the Ubuntu drive. Use these commands substituting your own drive it is not /dev/sda:

sudo mkdir /mnt/boot
sudo mkdir /mnt/writable
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/writable

Once you have mounted everything correctly your lsblk command’s output should look like this with the mountpoint field now populated:

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda           8:0    0 119.2G  0 disk 
├─sda1        8:1    0   256M  0 part /mnt/boot
└─sda2        8:2    0   2.8G  0 part /mnt/writable
mmcblk0     179:0    0  59.5G  0 disk 
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1    0   256M  0 part /boot
└─mmcblk0p2 179:2    0  59.2G  0 part /

Modify Mounted Partitions – Option A – Automated Script

If you just want to get your Ubuntu partition bootable I have made an automated script to do this. As long as you have mounted the partitions as /mnt/boot and /mnt/writable the script will make the necessary changes for Ubuntu 20.04 / 20.10 to boot! The source code for the script is available at https://github.com/TheRemote/Ubuntu-Server-raspi4-unofficial/blob/master/BootFix.sh

Here is a one liner to run the script:

sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/Ubuntu-Server-raspi4-unofficial/master/BootFix.sh | sudo bash

You may also download it for inspection (such as nano BootFix.sh or opening it in the Text Editor if you are using Desktop Raspbian) with:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/Ubuntu-Server-raspi4-unofficial/master/BootFix.sh -O BootFix.sh
chmod +x BootFix.sh
nano BootFix.sh

To execute the script use:

sudo ./BootFix.sh

As long as you mounted your partitions correctly it will modify the partition and tell you that it was successful. Now unmount your partitions with the following commands:

sudo umount /mnt/boot
sudo umount /mnt/writable

You may now shut down your Pi and remove the SD card from the Pi leaving just the USB mass storage device plugged in. Reconnect the power.

Modify Mounted Partitions – Option B – Manual Instructions

See bottom of the article for the manual instructions section

First Boot

If all went well the system should boot up into Ubuntu’s logon screen! The default credentials are:

Username: ubuntu
Password: ubuntu

Before logging in for the first time you will be forced to select a new password. Once you have done that you will be fully logged in!

Important Note: Upon logging in for the first time if the Pi is connected to the internet Ubuntu will immediately/soon start a lengthy update process via snapd and apt.  This can be annoying since you'll be ready to start configuring the system and if you do an apt install it will halt and wait for the updates to finish.  

It may seem like they're stuck, but if you use the 'top' command you will see all sorts of apt/package/update/extraction related activity happening.  Even on my 8 GB Pi and a gigabit fiber connection these took a good 20 minutes or so before my CPU activity went back to 0 and the apt lock released.

I highly recommend letting these finish and not yanking the power on the Pi / forcing a reboot / trying to kill the processes.  It will often cause a ton of very nasty apt and dpkg problems to the point where it's easier to start over from a fresh image than try to fsck and apt install --fix-broken your way out of it  Try to do other necessary configuration that doesn't involve apt in the mean time and let these finish in the background.

Once the patching is finished your shiny new Ubuntu 20.04 system is fully ready to use!

Manual Instructions

These are the manual instructions to recreate what the automated script does. If you used the automated script you don’t need to do anything further in this section unless you want to understand more about how it works or you want to do the process manually.

Decompress the kernel

We need to decompress the kernel as we will be changing the way the Pi is booting. Ubuntu uses u-boot by default and we will be switching away from that. We can do this with the following command:

zcat -qf "/mnt/boot/vmlinuz" > "/mnt/boot/vmlinux"

Update config.txt with correct parameters

Now let’s update /mnt/boot/config.txt with the parameters we need to load the decompressed kernel. Open up config.txt with nano with:

sudo nano /mnt/boot/config.txt

Change the [pi4] section to the following contents:

[pi4]
max_framebuffers=2
dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d
boot_delay
kernel=vmlinux
initramfs initrd.img followkernel

Create script to automatically decompress kernel

We are going to create a script to automatically decompress the kernel. If we don’t do this we have to decompress it every time Ubuntu updates. This particular part of the script was not written by me and was found at the post on the Raspberry Pi forums by egrechko.

First let’s create the decompression script. Open up a new file with nano using:

sudo nano /mnt/boot/auto_decompress_kernel

Paste the following contents:

#!/bin/bash -e
# auto_decompress_kernel script
BTPATH=/boot/firmware
CKPATH=$BTPATH/vmlinuz
DKPATH=$BTPATH/vmlinux
# Check if compression needs to be done.
if [ -e $BTPATH/check.md5 ]; then
   if md5sum --status --ignore-missing -c $BTPATH/check.md5; then
      echo -e "\e[32mFiles have not changed, Decompression not needed\e[0m"
      exit 0
   else
      echo -e "\e[31mHash failed, kernel will be compressed\e[0m"
   fi
fi
# Backup the old decompressed kernel
mv $DKPATH $DKPATH.bak
if [ ! $? == 0 ]; then
   echo -e "\e[31mDECOMPRESSED KERNEL BACKUP FAILED!\e[0m"
   exit 1
else
   echo -e "\e[32mDecompressed kernel backup was successful\e[0m"
fi
# Decompress the new kernel
echo "Decompressing kernel: "$CKPATH".............."
zcat -qf $CKPATH > $DKPATH
if [ ! $? == 0 ]; then
   echo -e "\e[31mKERNEL FAILED TO DECOMPRESS!\e[0m"
   exit 1
else
   echo -e "\e[32mKernel Decompressed Succesfully\e[0m"
fi
# Hash the new kernel for checking
md5sum $CKPATH $DKPATH > $BTPATH/check.md5
if [ ! $? == 0 ]; then
   echo -e "\e[31mMD5 GENERATION FAILED!\e[0m"
else
   echo -e "\e[32mMD5 generated Succesfully\e[0m"
fi
exit 0

Create apt script to call kernel decompression script automatically

This is a one liner to create a script to call the auto_decompress_kernel script:

echo 'DPkg::Post-Invoke {"/bin/bash /boot/firmware/auto_decompress_kernel"; };' | sudo tee /mnt/writable/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/999_decompress_rpi_kernel

Verify Drive Performance

You can make sure everything is running correctly (and as fast as it should be) by running my quick storage benchmark. You can run the benchmark with the following one-liner:

sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/PiBenchmarks/master/Storage.sh | sudo bash

This will give you a score you can compare to the other Raspberry Pi Storage Benchmark results and make sure that you are getting an equivalent speed to your peers with the same device!

Fix (some) USB Adapter Problems Using Quirks

Some storage adapters don’t work very well with the Raspberry Pi 4. There is an option that can get a lot of them working using quirks. If your Ubuntu is booting to emergency mode but not in normal mode it’s worth giving quirks a try. This lowers performance, but it’s still much faster than a SD card and your adapter won’t go to waste.

To find out the quirks mode string to use we need to find the device ID string for your adapter and then add an entry to cmdline.txt telling the kernel to apply them on boot.

Find Your Adapter

To apply the quirks we first need to get the adapter id. We will use the sudo lsusb command:

$ sudo lsusb
 Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
 Bus 002 Device 002: ID 174c:55aa ASMedia Technology Inc. Name: ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1053E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1153 SATA 3Gb/s bridge, ASM1153E SATA 6Gb/s bridge
 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
 Bus 001 Device 002: ID 2109:3431 VIA Labs, Inc. Hub
 Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

On line 2 we can see my ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge adapter (it’s the known working StarTech.com 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.1* adapter). You will see something very similar to mine when you run the command and it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out which device it is. If you need more information add a -v switch to make the command sudo lsusb -v. This can sometimes add some additional details to make it easier to figure out which one is your adapter.

If you’re still not sure, we have another command that between the two that can narrow things down. Type / paste the following:

sudo dmesg | grep usb

 [0.828535] usb usb3: New USB device found, idVendor=1d6b, idProduct=0002, bcdDevice= 4.19
 [0.828568] usb usb3: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=2, SerialNumber=1
 [0.828597] usb usb3: Product: DWC OTG Controller
 [0.828620] usb usb3: Manufacturer: Linux 4.19.75-v7l+ dwc_otg_hcd
 [0.828644] usb usb3: SerialNumber: fe980000.usb
 [0.830051] usbcore: registered new interface driver uas
 [0.830182] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
 [0.836488] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid
 [0.836511] usbhid: USB HID core driver
 [0.971598] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
 [1.154217] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=2109, idProduct=3431, bcdDevice= 4.20
 [1.154254] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=1, SerialNumber=0
 [1.154281] usb 1-1: Product: USB2.0 Hub
 [1.301989] usb 2-1: new SuperSpeed Gen 1 USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
 [1.332965] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=174c, idProduct=55aa, bcdDevice= 1.00
 [1.332999] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=1
 [1.333026] usb 2-1: Product: ASM105x
 [1.333048] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: ASMT
 [1.333071] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 123456789B79F

This is the dmesg log showing the hardware detection as hardware is activated on the Pi. If your log is really long you can generate fresh entries by just unplugging a device and plugging it back in and running the command again. Here we can clearly see that the ASM105x is what our StarTech adapter is being detected as.

Now we can go back to our first lsusb command and we want the 8 characters from the ID field that comes right after the Device:

Bus 002 Device 002: ID 174c:55aa ASMedia Technology Inc. Name: ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge

Our adapter’s ID is: 174c:55aa

Applying Quirks

To apply the quirks to our USB adapter we are going to edit /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt. Type:

sudo nano /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt

We are going to add the following entry into the very front of cmdline.txt:

usb-storage.quirks=XXXX:XXXX:u

In place of the X’s above you will put in your adapter’s ID that we got before. With the example commands I gave above mine would look like this: usb-storage.quirks=174c:55aa:u. After this my cmdline.txt looks like this (everything should be one continuous line, no line breaks!):

usb-storage.quirks=174c:55aa:u dwg_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=LABEL=writable rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait fixrtc

Now reboot the Pi. If the Pi fails to boot you can plug the SD card into the computer and go to /boot/cmdline.txt and undo the change we did so you can boot back in with your SD card.

Verifying Quirks

Once you have rebooted after changing cmdline.txt we can verify the quirks have been applied by doing another dmesg | grep usb command:

sudo dmesg | grep usb
 [1.332924] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=174c, idProduct=55aa, bcdDevice= 1.00
 [1.332957] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=1
 [1.332983] usb 2-1: Product: ASM105x
 [1.333006] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: ASMT
 [1.333028] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 123456789B79F
 [1.335967] usb 2-1: UAS is blacklisted for this device, using usb-storage instead
 [1.336071] usb 2-1: UAS is blacklisted for this device, using usb-storage instead
 [1.336103] usb-storage 2-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
 [1.336479] usb-storage 2-1:1.0: Quirks match for vid 174c pid 55aa: c00000
 [1.336611] scsi host0: usb-storage 2-1:1.0

This time we can see in dmesg that UAS was blacklisted for the device and it has loaded with the usb-storage driver instead. This driver tends to be more compatible with the “problematic adapters” but the performance is usually significantly lower. It’s definitely worth a try though as some adapters do better with the quirks performance-wise. The only way to know for sure is to run a benchmark (see “Verify Drive Performance” section).

Other Resources

To find out where to get the 64 bit version of Raspberry Pi OS: where to get the 64 bit Raspberry Pi OS image

To find out how to add a UPS backup battery to your Pi check out my UPS for Raspberry Pi guide

To reduce your CPU usage by 1% when USB booting check out my reducing 1% CPU usage while booting from mass storage device guide here

https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-4-ubuntu-20-04-usb-mass-storage-boot-guide/

This guide takes it a step further and shows you how to get Ubuntu 20.04 / 20.10 / 21.04 / etc. working with a SSD. Let’s get started!

Equipment Used

Kingston A400 2.5″ SATA SSD

StarTech 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0/3.1 Adapter

NVME Option (powered USB hub required, see “Power Requirements” section in my more generalized Raspberry Pi 4 USB booting guide):

Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe SSD

ASUS ROG Strix M.2 NVMe Enclosure

Prerequisites

Verify Power Supply Size (3.5A strongly recommended)

Using a 3.5A power supply* or powered USB hub* will ensure your drive is getting enough power without impacting the Pi’s stability.

Verify Storage Adapter Compatibility

You will need a USB 3.0 storage adapter. See my other article on USB booting not specific to Ubuntu for a lot more details on the storage adapters!

Get Latest Raspbian & Updates

First make sure that you have the absolute latest updates and firmware for the Pi. To upgrade all your packages and firmware to the latest version use the following command:

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y

Once the update has completed restart your Pi with a sudo reboot command to apply the latest firmware / kernel updates.

Verify EEPROM Bootloader is up to date

We can check if your Pi’s bootloader firmware is up to date with the following command:

sudo rpi-eeprom-update

If your Raspbian is very out of date you may not have this utility and can install it using:

sudo apt install rpi-eeprom

The output from rpi-eeprom-update will look like this if you are not up to date:

BCM2711 detected
VL805 firmware in bootloader EEPROM
*** UPDATE AVAILABLE ***
BOOTLOADER: update available
CURRENT: Thu 3 Sep 12:11:43 UTC 2020 (1599135103)
LATEST: Tue 24 Nov 15:08:04 UTC 2020 (1606230484)
FW DIR: /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/beta
VL805: up-to-date
CURRENT: 000138a1
LATEST: 000138a1

If it says any updates are available they be installed manually by adding ‘-a’ to the end of our previous command like this:

sudo rpi-eeprom-update -a

Changing rpi-eeprom’s Release Channel

Carlos and other commenters have reported that the current “critical” firmware didn’t work for them and they had to upgrade to the “stable” channel.

To switch to the stable channel we are going to edit the file /etc/default/rpi-eeprom-update:

sudo nano /etc/default/rpi-eeprom-update

Change the line FIRMWARE_RELEASE_STATUS=”critical” to:

FIRMWARE_RELEASE_STATUS="stable"

Now you can run sudo rpi-eeprom-update and you should see a new update available.

Install Ubuntu on USB Storage Device

64 bit images are recommended for the Pi 4 for better performance but the 32 bit images work as well.

Once you’ve downloaded the tool run it as administrator/sudo to avoid permission errors. To run the utility from the command line is usually sudo rpi-imager. You’ll be greeted with this screen:

Raspberry Pi Imager – Main Menu

Next click the “Choose OS” button:

Raspberry Pi Imager – OS Menu

sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop

Modifying Ubuntu for USB Booting

Find and Mount Storage Device

First let’s find your storage device using the command:

lsblk

This will show you all the storage devices attached to your system:

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda           8:0    0 119.2G  0 disk 
├─sda1        8:1    0   256M  0 part 
└─sda2        8:2    0   2.8G  0 part 
mmcblk0     179:0    0  59.5G  0 disk 
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1    0   256M  0 part /boot
└─mmcblk0p2 179:2    0  59.2G  0 part /

sudo umount /media/pi/writable
sudo umount /media/pi/system-boot

Now we are going to create two mountpoints and mount the Ubuntu drive. Use these commands substituting your own drive it is not /dev/sda:

sudo mkdir /mnt/boot
sudo mkdir /mnt/writable
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/writable

Once you have mounted everything correctly your lsblk command’s output should look like this with the mountpoint field now populated:

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda           8:0    0 119.2G  0 disk 
├─sda1        8:1    0   256M  0 part /mnt/boot
└─sda2        8:2    0   2.8G  0 part /mnt/writable
mmcblk0     179:0    0  59.5G  0 disk 
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1    0   256M  0 part /boot
└─mmcblk0p2 179:2    0  59.2G  0 part /

Modify Mounted Partitions – Option A – Automated Script

Here is a one liner to run the script:

sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/Ubuntu-Server-raspi4-unofficial/master/BootFix.sh | sudo bash

You may also download it for inspection (such as nano BootFix.sh or opening it in the Text Editor if you are using Desktop Raspbian) with:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/Ubuntu-Server-raspi4-unofficial/master/BootFix.sh -O BootFix.sh
chmod +x BootFix.sh
nano BootFix.sh

To execute the script use:

sudo ./BootFix.sh

As long as you mounted your partitions correctly it will modify the partition and tell you that it was successful. Now unmount your partitions with the following commands:

sudo umount /mnt/boot
sudo umount /mnt/writable

You may now shut down your Pi and remove the SD card from the Pi leaving just the USB mass storage device plugged in. Reconnect the power.

Modify Mounted Partitions – Option B – Manual Instructions

See bottom of the article for the manual instructions section

First Boot

If all went well the system should boot up into Ubuntu’s logon screen! The default credentials are:

Username: ubuntu
Password: ubuntu

Before logging in for the first time you will be forced to select a new password. Once you have done that you will be fully logged in!

Important Note: Upon logging in for the first time if the Pi is connected to the internet Ubuntu will immediately/soon start a lengthy update process via snapd and apt.  This can be annoying since you'll be ready to start configuring the system and if you do an apt install it will halt and wait for the updates to finish.  

It may seem like they're stuck, but if you use the 'top' command you will see all sorts of apt/package/update/extraction related activity happening.  Even on my 8 GB Pi and a gigabit fiber connection these took a good 20 minutes or so before my CPU activity went back to 0 and the apt lock released.

I highly recommend letting these finish and not yanking the power on the Pi / forcing a reboot / trying to kill the processes.  It will often cause a ton of very nasty apt and dpkg problems to the point where it's easier to start over from a fresh image than try to fsck and apt install --fix-broken your way out of it  Try to do other necessary configuration that doesn't involve apt in the mean time and let these finish in the background.

Once the patching is finished your shiny new Ubuntu 20.04 system is fully ready to use!

Manual Instructions

Decompress the kernel

We need to decompress the kernel as we will be changing the way the Pi is booting. Ubuntu uses u-boot by default and we will be switching away from that. We can do this with the following command:

zcat -qf "/mnt/boot/vmlinuz" > "/mnt/boot/vmlinux"

Update config.txt with correct parameters

Now let’s update /mnt/boot/config.txt with the parameters we need to load the decompressed kernel. Open up config.txt with nano with:

sudo nano /mnt/boot/config.txt

Change the [pi4] section to the following contents:

[pi4]
max_framebuffers=2
dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d
boot_delay
kernel=vmlinux
initramfs initrd.img followkernel

Create script to automatically decompress kernel

First let’s create the decompression script. Open up a new file with nano using:

sudo nano /mnt/boot/auto_decompress_kernel

Paste the following contents:

#!/bin/bash -e
# auto_decompress_kernel script
BTPATH=/boot/firmware
CKPATH=$BTPATH/vmlinuz
DKPATH=$BTPATH/vmlinux
# Check if compression needs to be done.
if [ -e $BTPATH/check.md5 ]; then
   if md5sum --status --ignore-missing -c $BTPATH/check.md5; then
      echo -e "\e[32mFiles have not changed, Decompression not needed\e[0m"
      exit 0
   else
      echo -e "\e[31mHash failed, kernel will be compressed\e[0m"
   fi
fi
# Backup the old decompressed kernel
mv $DKPATH $DKPATH.bak
if [ ! $? == 0 ]; then
   echo -e "\e[31mDECOMPRESSED KERNEL BACKUP FAILED!\e[0m"
   exit 1
else
   echo -e "\e[32mDecompressed kernel backup was successful\e[0m"
fi
# Decompress the new kernel
echo "Decompressing kernel: "$CKPATH".............."
zcat -qf $CKPATH > $DKPATH
if [ ! $? == 0 ]; then
   echo -e "\e[31mKERNEL FAILED TO DECOMPRESS!\e[0m"
   exit 1
else
   echo -e "\e[32mKernel Decompressed Succesfully\e[0m"
fi
# Hash the new kernel for checking
md5sum $CKPATH $DKPATH > $BTPATH/check.md5
if [ ! $? == 0 ]; then
   echo -e "\e[31mMD5 GENERATION FAILED!\e[0m"
else
   echo -e "\e[32mMD5 generated Succesfully\e[0m"
fi
exit 0

Create apt script to call kernel decompression script automatically

This is a one liner to create a script to call the auto_decompress_kernel script:

echo 'DPkg::Post-Invoke {"/bin/bash /boot/firmware/auto_decompress_kernel"; };' | sudo tee /mnt/writable/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/999_decompress_rpi_kernel

Verify Drive Performance

You can make sure everything is running correctly (and as fast as it should be) by running my quick storage benchmark. You can run the benchmark with the following one-liner:

sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/PiBenchmarks/master/Storage.sh | sudo bash

This will give you a score you can compare to the other Raspberry Pi Storage Benchmark results and make sure that you are getting an equivalent speed to your peers with the same device!

Fix (some) USB Adapter Problems Using Quirks

To find out the quirks mode string to use we need to find the device ID string for your adapter and then add an entry to cmdline.txt telling the kernel to apply them on boot.

Find Your Adapter

To apply the quirks we first need to get the adapter id. We will use the sudo lsusb command:

$ sudo lsusb
 Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
 Bus 002 Device 002: ID 174c:55aa ASMedia Technology Inc. Name: ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1053E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1153 SATA 3Gb/s bridge, ASM1153E SATA 6Gb/s bridge
 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
 Bus 001 Device 002: ID 2109:3431 VIA Labs, Inc. Hub
 Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

If you’re still not sure, we have another command that between the two that can narrow things down. Type / paste the following:

sudo dmesg | grep usb

 [0.828535] usb usb3: New USB device found, idVendor=1d6b, idProduct=0002, bcdDevice= 4.19
 [0.828568] usb usb3: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=2, SerialNumber=1
 [0.828597] usb usb3: Product: DWC OTG Controller
 [0.828620] usb usb3: Manufacturer: Linux 4.19.75-v7l+ dwc_otg_hcd
 [0.828644] usb usb3: SerialNumber: fe980000.usb
 [0.830051] usbcore: registered new interface driver uas
 [0.830182] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
 [0.836488] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid
 [0.836511] usbhid: USB HID core driver
 [0.971598] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
 [1.154217] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=2109, idProduct=3431, bcdDevice= 4.20
 [1.154254] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=1, SerialNumber=0
 [1.154281] usb 1-1: Product: USB2.0 Hub
 [1.301989] usb 2-1: new SuperSpeed Gen 1 USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
 [1.332965] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=174c, idProduct=55aa, bcdDevice= 1.00
 [1.332999] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=1
 [1.333026] usb 2-1: Product: ASM105x
 [1.333048] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: ASMT
 [1.333071] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 123456789B79F

Now we can go back to our first lsusb command and we want the 8 characters from the ID field that comes right after the Device:

Bus 002 Device 002: ID 174c:55aa ASMedia Technology Inc. Name: ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge

Our adapter’s ID is: 174c:55aa

Applying Quirks

To apply the quirks to our USB adapter we are going to edit /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt. Type:

sudo nano /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt

We are going to add the following entry into the very front of cmdline.txt:

usb-storage.quirks=XXXX:XXXX:u

usb-storage.quirks=174c:55aa:u dwg_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=LABEL=writable rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait fixrtc

Now reboot the Pi. If the Pi fails to boot you can plug the SD card into the computer and go to /boot/cmdline.txt and undo the change we did so you can boot back in with your SD card.

Verifying Quirks

Once you have rebooted after changing cmdline.txt we can verify the quirks have been applied by doing another dmesg | grep usb command:

sudo dmesg | grep usb
 [1.332924] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=174c, idProduct=55aa, bcdDevice= 1.00
 [1.332957] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=1
 [1.332983] usb 2-1: Product: ASM105x
 [1.333006] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: ASMT
 [1.333028] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 123456789B79F
 [1.335967] usb 2-1: UAS is blacklisted for this device, using usb-storage instead
 [1.336071] usb 2-1: UAS is blacklisted for this device, using usb-storage instead
 [1.336103] usb-storage 2-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
 [1.336479] usb-storage 2-1:1.0: Quirks match for vid 174c pid 55aa: c00000
 [1.336611] scsi host0: usb-storage 2-1:1.0

Other Resources

To find out where to get the 64 bit version of Raspberry Pi OS: where to get the 64 bit Raspberry Pi OS image

To find out how to add a UPS backup battery to your Pi check out my UPS for Raspberry Pi guide

To reduce your CPU usage by 1% when USB booting check out my reducing 1% CPU usage while booting from mass storage device guide here

https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-cheap-ssd-upgrade-30/

Raspberry Pi Cheap SSD Upgrade Guide

Published: February 4, 2019 / Last Modified: September 8, 2021 / Hardware, Raspberry Pi, Storage / 43 Comments

I’ve covered the benefits of taking your Raspberry Pi to a solid state drive (SSD) before extensively in this article but in a nutshell you get around a 280% increase in raw throughput and a 1000% increase in 4k random read/writes over a MicroSD card.

That’s fantastic but SSDs have traditionally been very expensive costing you as much as 4+ Raspberry Pis so it seemed silly to use a drive like that as Pi storage. Until now.

That’s right. Thanks to technologies such as 3D NAND flash solid state drives for consumers have now become cheaper than mid-high range MicroSD cards. With 10x the performance of MicroSD cards they are now a no-brainer upgrade for servers or IO intensive Raspberry Pi projects.

Why Choose SSD?

MicroSD cards were not designed to serve as living storage for operating systems. They are designed for devices such as cameras and smart phones that need to write and reliably store data. They’re very good at this and some cards have excellent throughput fast enough to even record 4K video.

But one thing they are not good at is 4k random writes and rewrites. These are small writes throughout a disk and consist of about 25% of all hard drive activity on a computer. Almost every action you take and even routine log file updates trigger these updates so they are very important for performance.

To show you the difference in performance I have developed a benchmark that anyone can run and uploads the results to the site. Click here to see benchmark results.

As you can see all of the top spots in the results are held by solid state drives. Further, solid state drives beat the fastest MicroSD cards by about 300%.

MicroSD performance varied wildly based on quality of the card. But even the very best and most expensive MicroSD cards got absolutely destroyed by even the cheapest solid state drives. This is because SSDs are so fast that they are limited by the speed of the Raspberry Pi’s USB 2.0 ports.

Solid state drives also have very large write caches. This lets your Raspberry Pi push data to the drive and start doing other things and let the drive itself figure out how to organize the data. Much of the throughput and other performance differences in the above chart are because of much better and faster read/write caching.

Which SSD to Buy?

Several contenders for the RPI storage benchmarks

Since all models and types of solid state drives hit the Raspberry Pi’s USB 2.0 transfer speed limit you should buy the cheapest one that fits your needs!

If your Raspberry Pi is mostly stationary it’s easiest and cheapest to just use a normal 2.5″ SATA SSD with a USB adapter. Here’s my recommendation:

Kingston A400 2.5″ SATA SSD

StarTech 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0/3.1 Adapter

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The Kingston A400 drive performs really well in the Raspberry Pi Storage Benchmarks. It’s a great drive and is cheaper than many mid-range MicroSD cards. Another popular choice is the Crucial BX500 which you can sometimes find in a very cheap 120GB version:

Crucial BX500 2.5″ SATA SSD

The Crucial BX500 is another great choice for a drive to use with the Pi. It’s the 2nd most popular SSD benchmarked with over 840 benchmarks submitted. Low power requirements and widely available!

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The 2.5″ SATA to USB adapter above allows us to connect a drive like this to our Pi using USB. There is no power adapter needed as 2.5″ SSDs using adapters are low power and are powered by the Pi through USB. Be careful with enclosures as they tend to take a bit more (see “Power Requirements” section below).

Compact SSD Options

If you move your Pi around a lot or need something more compact there are a couple of options. These eliminate having any extra cables as they plug directly into the USB slot.

SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD

The SanDisk Extreme Pro USB SSD is a true solid state drive. This is different than a typical “flash drive” which uses extremely cheap memory and has very low random I/O performance/throughput compared to a real solid state drive. I’ve used both the USB 3.1 and USB 3.2 variants with the Pi successfully and they benchmark very well!

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Orico GV100 NVMe SSD

The Orico GV100 is a portable NVMe usb-stick style drive. It’s extremely fast due to actually being a true NVMe drive in a very compact form. This is an excellent choice if you are building a setup that has very limited space or having a dangling adapter/enclosure would be problematic.

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There are some flash drives (a very small number) that are actually real solid state drives. These two are the most popular ones on pibenchmarks.com and I have both of them.

You have to be extremely careful when looking for these as 99.9% of flash drives are NOT solid states. The SanDisk Extreme Pro is a true solid state. The cheaper SanDisk Extreme and Extreme Gos are not (needs to be the pro). If you are looking at a USB style drive and they don’t explicitly state it’s a solid state drive then it definitely isn’t!

Other SSD Options

There are many other types of SSDs and storage adapters you can use. For example, there is an older type of drive technology called mini-SATA or mSATA that can be found in a lot of old laptops or bought for very very cheap. I wrote an article on mSATA to USB 3.0 storage adapters here covering these.

There are also extensive M.2 NVME to USB 3.0 and M.2 SATA to USB 3.0 options available as well. You can build a M.2 SATA or M.2 NVME SSD but you need to be careful with which type of M.2 drive you have/buy. They can be B-key, M-key, or M+B keyed. By far the most common and cheap ones are SATA with a B or B+M key. The adapter I have is this one.* For a full overview of different available options check out my Raspberry Pi 4 USB Mass Storage Device Booting Guide where collectively as a community we’ve compiled the best list we can of working and nonworking adapters.

Power Requirements

Most types of adapters can be powered by the Pi itself. One notable exception is NVMe enclosures. Throughout the years we have had hundreds of comments from people who had no trouble powering 2.5″ SATA enclosures but couldn’t get a NVMe one to work at all without a powered USB hub.

Very large older 3.5″ SATA drives are known to require more power than the Pi can provide as well as some types of very high performance models that were designed to burn more power to get extra performance gains.

For solid state storage older models of solid state drives (SSDs) are also known to draw more power than their newer counterparts. If you have a drive that you think may fall into this category then definitely be on the lookout for power related issues and extra cautious about your power setup. High end “extreme” performance models also tend to draw more power (Samsung 970 NVMe drives* are some of the fastest in the world but also pretty power hungry for the Pi).

Insufficient Power Symptoms

Symptoms of a lack of power to the drive can include the system only booting sometimes (or not at all) or working for a while and then locking up. Just because the drive boots does not mean it is getting enough power.

Some commenters on previous articles have described this as working fine until there was a sudden spike in CPU usage while they tried to do several things at once (high CPU, accessing storage, activating various hardware all at once) and then they would get a lockup/crash.

This is because the Pi is teetering on the edge of not having enough power and that spike caused it to drop enough where the drive actually lost power (likely only for tiny fractions of a second). This is enough instability to easily cause a crash and worse if it happened to be in the middle of writing something important! Usually nothing will happen other than you’ll have to restart the Pi but because of the risk of data loss and eventually corrupting files. That being said, if you’re particularly unlucky you will have to fsck the drive or potentially even reimage it if fsck is unable to repair the damage!

The best answer is to test for stability. Do this by stressing out the Pi and make sure you are doing activities that stress the CPU and storage at the same time like browsing the web, etc. and if you can do that for a few hours/days without a lockup/crash then you have a stable power setup!

Powered USB Hub Solution

For NVMe enclosures and power hungry drives I personally use this Sabrent powered USB hub and have been recommending it here on the blog for a long time:

Sabrent Powered USB 3.0 Hub

Links: Amazon.ca*, Amazon.cn, Amazon.com*, Amazon.com.au*, Amazon.co.uk*, Amazon.es*, Amazon.it*, Amazon.se*

Note: Make sure Amazon doesn’t try to take you to the non-powered version and that it’s the one with the AC adapter that plugs in to provide extra power

If this hub isn’t an option for you and you don’t have one already you can try with it then look in the reviews for people saying that it is working with Raspberry Pi. Some powered USB hubs will not play nice with the Pi so before buying one definitely check reviews and do some careful research about what to expect with the Raspberry Pi!

Oversized Power Adapter Solution

This solution will work for setups that are right on the border of having enough and not having enough power. An example would be if you can get a stable boot but are getting occasional lockups/freezes when the power dips just below the threshold it needs.

If you are using a powerful NVMe drive/enclosure combo like the ICY BOX with a high performance Samsung NVMe drive even with the extra 500 mA it will still not even boot. I have had these oversized adapters and they are great but for a very powerful drive/adapter combination you are going to need more than 500 mA.

CanaKit 3.5A Power Adapter

The CanaKit 3.5A adapter has an extra half an amp (500 mA) of capacity to give some breathing room to your accessories. This is bigger than the official Pi power supply which provides 3.0A.

Links: Amazon.ca*, Amazon.com*, Amazon.com.au*, Amazon.com.mx*, Amazon.sg*

It’s a lot less extra wires and one less AC plug though if you are right on the border and just need a little bit more. It will depend on your individual drive/adapter combo whether it’s enough or you will have to go full powered USB hub!

In previous articles readers have told me that this specific adapter can be hard to find outside of North America. I tried to link to as many regions as I could find it in but there should be something equivalent in your region (it just likely won’t be specifically designed for the Pi but will be a more generic USB-C charger).

Look for a USB-C power supply rated to supply around 3.5A. 3.0A or lower won’t do much good as that is almost certainly what you already are using. You can use a higher one (at your own risk). The largest one I’ve ever used is my Dell laptop’s 30W USB-C power adapter. It’s probably not a good idea to go too much bigger than this or to even use one this big over the long term (I didn’t, just for occasional testing and as a emergency backup) but USB-C does have some specification improvements related to power management that seem to provide some flexibility here.

Power Limits

The Pi can only pass through a limited amount of extra power. On the Pi 4 this is up to 1.2A of extra power for peripherals (combined) on top of the board’s 3.0A power rating. This is much more than the Pi 2 and some other previous models could do which was only around 0.5A. This also means that getting a power adapter bigger than about 4.2A of rated current is pointless because the Pi won’t allow any more power to flow through to the board to the peripherals through USB anyway even if it’s available.

I’m oversimplifying a little bit to illustrate the point but if you want the full technical details they are available here in the Raspberry Pi USB documentation. The important takeaway is that going much above 3.5-4.0A or so will not actually provide any more power to the Pi because of these limits. If you’ve hit this ceiling and it still isn’t enough you need to go powered USB hub.

I’ve also used ones that charge cell phones to power Pis before and these ones are the most likely to fall into a range close to what the Pi uses. Most of the ones I had around the house for phones were 2.5A (just barely not enough) or 3.0A so it was enough for a backup spare but not enough to provide extra power. Nevertheless, it’s definitely worth it to check what you already have around and see if there are USB-C chargers around to test with!

Note that a powered USB hub essentially bypasses these limits because the power for your peripherals such as your USB storage will come from the AC adapter connection to the powered USB hub instead of the Pi having to provide that power.

Powered USB Hub Troubleshooting

Most hubs including the Sabrent one above can feed back power into the Pi which can cause it to not boot when the power is connected. The reason for this is that the Pi is detecting power and is trying to power on using that source but the current provided isn’t enough for the Pi to actually boot.

The solution to this is to remove the USB hub’s connection from your Pi momentarily and then connect the power. Plug your USB hub back in quickly after reconnecting the Pi’s power (if you have native USB booting set up) and unless you really fumble with reconnecting it you will have it plugged in well before it tries to boot from the SSD!

If this trick doesn’t work then unfortunately you may have a powered USB hub that is not going to work with the Pi. It’s worth checking to see if there are any firmware updates available for your USB hub before you give up on it as some readers have let me know in the comments of previous articles that they were able to get some hubs working after a firmware upgrade!

Benchmarking / Testing Storage

If you’re getting poor performance or just want to verify everything is working correctly you may want to run my storage benchmark with:

sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/PiBenchmarks/master/Storage.sh | sudo bash

If you search for the model of your drive on pibenchmarks.com you can compare your score with others and make sure the drive is performing correctly!

Create Bootable Drive

Creating your bootable drive is also very easy. You simply image it the same way you would image a blank MicroSD.

I use Win32DiskImager and simply select the USB attached drive just like you would with a MicroSD card and write the image. It’s very easy!

Don’t forget to place an empty “ssh” file in the /boot directory if you want to connect via SSH.

Prevent High CPU Usage

There is an issue where using a solid state drive will cause kworker to consume around 1-10% of your CPU all of the time. This is due to the Pi polling constantly for a Micro SD card to be inserted.

There are two ways to fix this. One is to insert a blank Micro SD card in the Micro SD slot and leave it there all the time. The other is to add a line to your /boot/config.txt. Open up config.txt and add the following:

dtparam=sd_poll_once

This option will tell the Pi to only check for a Micro SD card once at bootup. This means if you want to access the card it needs to be in the Pi before it boots up.

I also wrote a complete guide on this very issue that is available here: Fix ~% CPU Usage When SSD Booting with Raspberry Pi

Create Bootable Drive

Creating your bootable drive is also very easy. You simply image it the same way you would image a blank MicroSD.

I use Win32DiskImager and simply select the USB attached drive just like you would with a MicroSD card and write the image. It’s very easy!

Don’t forget to place an empty “ssh” file in the /boot directory if you want to connect via SSH.

SSD With Raspberry Pi 4

If you aren’t sure which SSD / storage adapter to get I have an extensive guide available here: Raspberry Pi 4 / 400 Storage Adapter Guide

SSD With Raspberry Pi 3

Once you have chosen your SSD it is time to configure the Raspberry Pi to boot off USB storage. Fortunately this is extremely simple. To enable booting from USB storage simply boot up your Raspberry Pi and run this command:

echo program_usb_boot_mode=1 | sudo tee -a /boot/config.txt

Alternatively you can put your MicroSD into your computer and open /boot/config.txt and add the line:

 program_usb_boot_mode=1

Now reboot your Pi and USB boot support will be permanently enabled. This only needs to be done once per Raspberry Pi as the change is permanent.

You may now remove the Micro SD card altogether and plug in your external storage you prepared in the previous section. Power up the Pi and it will boot directly from the USB storage!

SSD with Raspberry Pi 1 / 2 / Zero W

The older Pi family and the Zero / Zero W also support USB booting with a small catch. You still need to have a Micro SD card inserted in the Pi with only one file on (bootcode.bin). This is because these Pis use the older BCM2835 which is a Micro SD only bootloader.

The good news is that if we put a otherwise blank Micro SD card in there with this file the Pi can boot from USB storage just fine and take full advantage of the increased speed and storage size. Bootcode.bin basically provides the instructions to the Pi telling it how to boot from USB.

First you will format your Micro SD card as FAT32 . FAT32 is the partition type that the Pi bootloader can read and is the same format as the /boot/ partition on a fully imaged Pi card.

Next grab the latest bootcode.bin from the official Raspberry Pi repository at https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/raw/master/boot/bootcode.bin

Copy the bootcode.bin file onto your newly created and otherwise blank FAT32 imaged Micro SD card and then insert the Micro SD card back into the Raspberry Pi.

Now connect your USB storage back to the Pi and power it on. The Pi will boot directly from your USB storage device!

Conclusion

A solid state drive is the biggest upgrade you can give your Pi. When I am configuring my Minecraft Raspberry Pi servers the performance difference is night and day. They boot faster, respond faster and write/read much faster. It’s very difficult to go back to MicroSD after using one of these with your Pi.

I highly recommend running the benchmark for yourself to get an idea of how much performance you can gain!

Other Resources

To find out how to add a UPS backup battery to your Pi check out my UPS for Raspberry Pi guide

To reduce your CPU usage by 1% when USB booting check out my reducing 1% CPU usage while booting from mass storage device guide here

If you’re looking for a guide on setting up SSD booting with your Pi check out my Pi 4 Native USB Mass Storage Device Booting Guide

If you want to find out the best storage adapters and SSDs for the Pi check out the Best Storage Adapters for the Raspberry Pi 4 / 400

If you want to see which Pi storage performs the fastest and get an idea of what kind of drives to look for check out my 2020’s Fastest Raspberry Pi 4 Storage Benchmarks

For fixing storage adapters / improving performance with firmware updates: Fixing Storage Adapters for Raspberry Pi with Firmware Updates

If you have one of the new Raspberry Pi 400 kits *then don’t miss my Pi 400 Overclocking and SSD Setup Guide

Create Bootable Drive

SSD With Raspberry Pi 4

Raspberry Pi 4 / 400 Ubuntu USB Mass Storage Boot Guide

Equipment Used

Prerequisites

Verify Power Supply Size (3.5A strongly recommended)

Recommended Power Solutions

Verify Storage Adapter Compatibility

Get Latest Raspbian & Updates

Verify EEPROM Bootloader is up to date

Changing rpi-eeprom’s Release Channel

Install Ubuntu on USB Storage Device

Modifying Ubuntu for USB Booting

Find and Mount Storage Device

Modify Mounted Partitions – Option A – Automated Script

Modify Mounted Partitions – Option B – Manual Instructions

First Boot

Manual Instructions

Decompress the kernel

Update config.txt with correct parameters

Create script to automatically decompress kernel

Create apt script to call kernel decompression script automatically

Verify Drive Performance

Fix (some) USB Adapter Problems Using Quirks

Find Your Adapter

Applying Quirks

Verifying Quirks

Other Resources

Equipment Used

Prerequisites

Verify Power Supply Size (3.5A strongly recommended)

Recommended Power Solutions

Verify Storage Adapter Compatibility

Get Latest Raspbian & Updates

Verify EEPROM Bootloader is up to date

Changing rpi-eeprom’s Release Channel

Install Ubuntu on USB Storage Device

Modifying Ubuntu for USB Booting

Find and Mount Storage Device

Modify Mounted Partitions – Option A – Automated Script

Modify Mounted Partitions – Option B – Manual Instructions

First Boot

Manual Instructions

Decompress the kernel

Update config.txt with correct parameters

Create script to automatically decompress kernel

Create apt script to call kernel decompression script automatically

Verify Drive Performance

Fix (some) USB Adapter Problems Using Quirks

Find Your Adapter

Applying Quirks

Verifying Quirks

Other Resources

Raspberry Pi Cheap SSD Upgrade Guide

Why Choose SSD?

Which SSD to Buy?

Compact SSD Options

Other SSD Options

Power Requirements

Insufficient Power Symptoms

Powered USB Hub Solution

Oversized Power Adapter Solution

Power Limits

Powered USB Hub Troubleshooting

Benchmarking / Testing Storage

Create Bootable Drive

Prevent High CPU Usage

Create Bootable Drive

SSD With Raspberry Pi 4

SSD With Raspberry Pi 3

SSD with Raspberry Pi 1 / 2 / Zero W

Conclusion

Other Resources

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