USB BOOTING
Boot your Pi faster from USB storage
Les Pounder feels the need, the need for speeding up his Raspberry Pi 4 using USB 3…
OUR EXPERT
Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance maker for hire. He blogs about his adventures and projects at http://bigl.es.
YOU NEED
Raspberry Pi 4 or 400
USB 3 flash drive 16GB microSD card
Official Raspberry Pi power supply
For many of us, booting the Raspberry Pi from microSD is more than enough, but for those of us who want speed, we need USB. It has been possible to boot the Pi from USB for some time, but in recent months it has become far easier thanks to the official Raspberry Pi Imager. The imager now supports flashing the bootloader by writing a special configuration to a microSD card. This then programs the bootloader to look for USB boot drives as a priority.
In this tutorial we will download and install Raspberry Pi Imager to our machine, then use it to make a microSD card to flash the bootloader. Then we will install Raspberry Pi OS to a USB drive. With 128GB USB 3 flash drives now becoming dirt cheap, there is never a better time to give your Pi a speed boost for very little money. Note that we recommend the official Raspberry Pi power supply for your model of Pi. External USB drives, especially USB-to-SATA/NVMe enclosures, can draw more power. With that said, let’s start building a super-speedy USB-boot Raspberry Pi.