Beginners • Re: USB SSD as Boot drive

It's generally good practice to keep data and boot drives separate...though; of course, not always practical.

Yep. On my main development Pi /home is mounted from my (also Pi based) NAS.

I find the RP installation rather restrictive compared to other Linuxes which allow me to partition the disk however I like. On Intel machines, I frequently used to have multiple OS installed on different partitions with separate data areas. This meant that I could easily upgrade/delete/install a different distro without affecting the data ...Though obviously a backup first is always a good idea. All of us who've worked in the industry will have anecdotes of severe pain caused by a lack of backups....or avoided by their existence

Again, yep. On the rare occasions where I have a Pi with three partitions (boot, root, and data) on the same media when I need to do an OS upgradde or reinstall that usually ends up being by installing the new OS to new boot media, wiping the boot and root partitions on the target drive then rsyncing te new OS over.

I suspect that the reasons why the Pi installation is as it is are historical. ...Only small SD cards were available initially as boot devices; 32 bit OS, simplicity for the target audience etc etc.

I suspect it was more to do with the lack of a BIOS on the BCM2835. That and the single storage device combined with the initially very low current available to USB connected devices that could just about run a keyboard and mouse. A traditional installer would need to be able to run entirely from RAM and install back to the media it booted from. Much easier to ship an entire drive image and, as you suggest, much eaier for new comers.

Statistics: Posted by thagrol — Tue Jul 09, 2024 11:02 am

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