Should you’re seeking to run your working system from some high-capacity high-speed storage in your Raspberry Pi 5, you will want extra than simply an M.2 NVMe HAT+ accent: you will must know methods to get the system to acknowledge drives bigger than 2TB in dimension, for which pseudonymous tinkerer “coreyfro,” hereafter merely “Corey,” has written a step-by-step information.
“Should you picture a disk which is bigger than 2TB with the Raspberry Pi instruments or [disk] photographs, your disk might be restricted to 2TB as a result of they use MBR (Grasp Boot Document) [format] as an alternative of GPT (GUID Partition Desk),” Corey explains. “I wrote these directions to make use of GPT, as an alternative. I’m utilizing a 4TB Staff Group NVMe SSD with a Pineberry Pi Backside Pi HAT.”
Should you’re seeking to get high-capacity storage strapped to your Raspberry Pi 5, it’s possible you’ll want to leap by way of a number of hoops first. (📷: Gareth Halfacree)
The Raspberry Pi 5 launched late final 12 months as the primary mainstream mannequin within the single-board pc vary to supply a user-accessible PCI Specific lane — very best for high-speed solid-state storage. Whereas Raspberry Pi has but to launch its personal M.2 HAT+ adapter, third-party designers have stepped in to fill the hole — together with fashions from Pineberry Pi, Pimoroni, Waveshare, and most just lately SupTronics.
No matter which mannequin you select, if you happen to pair it with an NVMe drive above 2TB you are going to run into issues making use of your drive’s full capability. The answer — described by Corey as a work-in-progress information which “labored for me” — is a step-by-step course of which creates a partition structure on a microSD Card utilizing the newer GPT format.
Quite a few M.2 HAT+ boards are actually out there, although Raspberry Pi’s official model continues to be pending. (📷: Waveshare)
This partition structure is then populated with knowledge from Raspberry Pi Imager, edited to level to the NVMe drive somewhat than the SD Card, and became a brand new picture which could be written onto the goal NVMe drive — and compressed for ease of storage, do you have to wish to hold it secure for future OS installations. “[The] MBR2GPT command does NOT work,” Corey writes of the rationale for the considerably roundabout course of, “because it arbitrarily filters out gadgets which are not enumerated with the ‘sd{a-z}‘ label.”
Corey’s full information is obtainable on Reddit. “I provide the next with no guarantee,” the tinkerer writes. “There could also be typos. Your discretion is suggested.”