Replace SD card with an ssd
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While taking a break from 3d printing, I've been playing around with home automation using something call "Home assistant" which can be run on an RPi. One topic which comes up a lot, is the need to regularly back up the system to mitigate what happens when the SD card fails (not if, but when). Many users change their system to use SSD instead of the SD card. In my case, I chose to replace the RPi with an Odroid which comes with an SSD built in.
While the above rambling might seem irrelevant, there are parallels with the Duet ecosystem. Admittedly SD card failures seem to be rare, probably because the number of writes is far less than when running something like home assistant. But failures can happen and boot times are a bit on the slow side IMO.
So I was wondering if anyone had tried using a SBC fitted with an SSD on their Duet. Could it be done? More importantly, for us stand alone users, could a main board be hacked to use an SSD instead of an SD card?Edit. I note that SD to SATA adaptors are available. Would that work on a Duet main board?
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@deckingman both the raspberry pi 3 and 4 support booting from an SSD only (no SD cards in sight). I have used this on a duet and independently.
edit: to add to that, the boot times were typically 25 seconds with a 6HC and a pi 4 (4gb ram) and a 60gb SSD (using a USB3 to sata adapter)
Have you got a link to the SD to SATA adapters? a quick google came up empty
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@deckingman Ian Have you looked at the Pi4 Compute modules which can have inbuilt EMC
Would also nee the IO Board as well see https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-compute-module-4-io-board
the downside would be the overall footprint.
Doug
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@deckingman said in Replace SD card with an ssd:
I note that SD to SATA adaptors are available. Would that work on a Duet main board?
A SD to SATA adapter would not provide any improvement in the speed of reading data. It might possibly speed up writing data, and hence improve the speed of uploading files a little.
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@deckingman said in Replace SD card with an ssd:
Edit. I note that SD to SATA adaptors are available. Would that work on a Duet main board?
While there are adaptors that allow an SD card to be connected to the SATA interface, I can't find any that work the other way, and it's mainly because SD cards use a simple storage protocol (and has small overhead that the Duet can cope with), while SATA and USB are much more complex protocols. Here's an old link from 2012 that explains why it's difficult:
https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/1765/possible-to-connect-sata-device-to-the-sd-slotRealistically, a USB interface (with a USB chip) for connecting drives (either USB memory sticks or SSD drives) would probably be the way to go for a standalone, though that doesn't help with existing Duets. However, the rise of connected SBCs like the Raspberry Pi has effectively leapfrogged this option, I think.
Ian
