Boot Raspberry pi 3 from a usb drive

[fox]

This article in maketecheasier provides a nice set of instructions for how to boot up the Rpi 3 from an external drive. It assumes that you are using Pixel. It is very easy to follow, and is easily adaptable to other Rpi distros. It involves copying over your file to the usb drive you want to use and then making minor changes to two config files. The config changes are the same ones I made on Berryboot to get my pi to boot from a usb pendrive.

[ssfc72]

Mike, does instatlling Raspberry to a usb drive (even a thumb drive) speed up the operation of the OS or just the boot process?

I wonder because once the OS gets loaded into the Raspberry memory, then maybe the usb drive is not used that much, to speed things up?

[fox]

My experience is that putting the system on a usb drive markedly increases responsiveness. This probably wouldn't be as noticeable on a straight media server distro like LibreELEC, but definitely on Debian Pixel and Ubuntu Mate. First of all, applications are present wherever the OS is. So if you click on an application, even the one that opens files, it has to read the content and load it before it's even in RAM. And every usb device I tried read at 2-3x the speed of the SD card. Also, the pi has only 1 gb RAM and 1/4 to 1/3 of this is used by the OS. If you then open up a few applications, the content in RAM has to be exchanged with the drive where the information is stored, again affecting the responsiveness of the system. There are probably SD cards that can read and write at the same speed as a good usb pendrive or HD connected to a usb 2 port, but they would be expensive. Just wait until the pi contains usb 3 ports! One can already find them on a $30 (US) board, the just-announced nano pi m1 plus.

[Jason]

Just wait until the pi contains usb 3 ports! One can already find them on a $30 (US) board, the just-announced nano pi m1 plus.

It has a USB 3 port? I didn't see that in the specs for the NanoPi M1 Plus.

In any case, the 8 GB eMMC storage is an interesting feature.

[fox]

Hmmn. You are right, Jason. Not sure now whether it was another single board computer or I just didn't have my glasses on when I read the nano pi text.