The Raspberry Pi Thread

The way I read it, you still boot from the SD card but then after that everything runs from the external drive. The file system is transferred to the external drive. If it's an SSD it should be faster than running from the SD card. Especially if the SD card is a cheaper slower one. Should save wear and tear on the SD card too. If your external is an old slow laptop drive it may not be worth the hassle. As far as running applications, it wouldn't change anything in that regards for me. I'll run what I run, external drive or no external drive. I'm not going to load my Pi up with extra stuff. My SSD is just for storing my media, music and videos etc. I don't have any extra drives attached to the Pi on my contraption.

The writer mentioned that he needs to setup something that requires more gigs of space which is why he wants to swap the boot drive. The question is if the Pi's processor and RAM can handle it (the "big" application).

My Pi is more powerful that some PC's I had not all that long ago. My AMD Athlon powered PC comes to mind. 1100 Mhz with 1 gig of RAM, single core. The Pi model 2 isn't all that bad really. IMHO

alphanumeric said:

My Pi is more powerful that some PC's I had not all that long ago. My AMD Athlon powered PC comes to mind. 1100 Mhz with 1 gig of RAM, single core. The Pi model 2 isn't all that bad really. IMHO

At that time, programs are not resource hungry like now. :)

As always ,YMMV.

I connected my old Pi permanently to my TV in the bedroom. The power source is remote controlled because I plugged it in to the TV's USB port. I shut the pi down with the PC remote that I got from ebay and then turn the power off by turning the tv off with its own remote.

Not really worth the effort for me. I only posted it because I vaguely remember somebody talking about booting from a hard drive instead of the SD card. This is about as close as you'll get until maybe model 3 or 2 C. Actually I think mSATA would be the way to go. A small mSATA drive would likely fit under the Pi board. Imaging your drive could be tricky though. I can see why they went with the SD card. It's simple compared to other options.

alphanumeric said:

Not really worth the effort for me. I only posted it because I vaguely remember somebody talking about booting from a hard drive instead of the SD card. This is about as close as you'll get until maybe model 3 or 2 C. Actually I think mSATA would be the way to go. A small mSATA drive would likely fit under the Pi board. Imaging your drive could be tricky though. I can see why they went with the SD card. It's simple compared to other options.

Same thought here. I'm only gonna do that if I need more space for special programs. But then again, I might be pushing the pi to the limit and not get a good outcome.

badrobot said:

Same thought here. I'm only gonna do that if I need more space for special programs. But then again, I might be pushing the pi to the limit and not get a good outcome.

Just put a bigger SD card in. I have a 32 gig waiting for Windows 10 for IoT. I'd only do it to speed things up using an SSD.