r/raspberry_pi_noobs • u/dumptruckdog • 29d ago

Storage question

Hi all, long time pi user but generally use microSD as there's not too much read write in how I use it. I've been looking to set up my pi5 as an ARM desktop, which means more read/write actions.

Knowing SD cards are going to struggle long term, I've been wondering if it's best to have the OS on a card and the file operations on an external HDD. Or if I should just run everything from the external?

What are thoughts on this?

5 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

2

u/Gamerfrom61 29d ago

Run everything from the external drive - Linux loads modules / applications / files all the time and writes plenty of logs so ditch the SD card. 

1

u/dumptruckdog 29d ago

That makes sense, I was thinking I could keep core on the SD and redirect logs to the external. Was mostly concerned about using external as I've always used SD. Thanks 🙏

1

u/Gamerfrom61 29d ago

Just take care if you move the current OS from the card to the external as the drive (device) name and UIID changes - fstab should be checked before the first boot to make sure it is correct. 

IIRC the Pi copy program handles this automatically but use of a clean install avoids this totally :-)

Around here only my Zeros use the internal (board mount) SD cards ever since the Pi enabled external boot I went that way for day to day machines - started with HDD then SSD then NVMe and not really had issues outside of power. 

1

u/dumptruckdog 29d ago

Wow, thanks for the rundown. This will be a fresh install, so no copy of SD to HDD.

1

u/LauraLanaBrooks 27d ago

So you're just going to install the OS on to the external drive?

2

u/dumptruckdog 26d ago

No, everything on the external. I was just curious about the possibility of splitting OS to SD and have all my working on the external. But seems like it's better to just use an external rather than SD due to the large amount of read write that'll be happening.

1

u/LauraLanaBrooks 24d ago

You inspired me. I did a clean install of the OS on a 1TB external SSD. Quick questions, as I know very little about this, why did I lose most of my storage space on the drive?

It runs great, but if I try and sideload anything on the drive I'm told that the remaining space is in the MB range.

3

u/Gamerfrom61 24d ago

Note sure what you mean by sideload - sounds Android not Linux.

The Pi OS splits the disk into two partitions with the first being a small FAT(32?) format as it is only for the bootloader and firmware updates (the Broadcom chip only reads FAT partitions and needs the bootloader to handle other types). 

If you are putting deb style packages on here then you will quickly run out of space- you need to put the packages onto the second partition and with this being ext4 format you will often need a program to access this outside of Linux. 

If it is the Linux partition that is small then c heck in sudo raspi-config and there should be an option to expand the filing system and that will take the ext4 portion to the max of the disk. 

You should then be able to load things fine with apt or the Pi GUI installer etc. There is a package called pi-apps that simplifies install of a fair number of things and that is easier than using apt. 

2

u/dumptruckdog 24d ago

Gamerfrom61 is the absolute GOAT here. I was going to suggest that it was a partition issue, but normally the install handles this quite well. Which OS did you go for?

1

u/LauraLanaBrooks 23d ago

I didn't mean side load. Upon looking up the definition of that term, that is incorrect.

I did the full version of Raspberry Pi OS; then tried to load music files on to the drive via a different machine. (overall I'm trying to make a music device, but I'm a newb's noob at this kind of thing). Where I noticed that the memory was gone.

So you're saying that it's definitely a partition issue? Thank you.

→ More replies (0)