How can I boot RetroPie from NVMe or SSD (without SD)?

yashax

I have Raspberry Pi 4 / 4GB with official Power Supply.

How can I install the RetroPie and boot it directly from NVMe and/or SSD, without using an SD card? Or if SD card is necessary, its OK as well.

Thank you so much in advance,
Jake

mitu

USB only boot is currently in Beta (still testing) for the PI4 - https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2711_bootloader_config.md.

Lolonois

Without using the beta feature from above, you still need a SD card containing the /boot folder and contents. Any size from 128MB up will work.

If you want to max out the speed via USB check that the USB controller is fully compatible with USB Attached SCSI (UAS). Like this one for example.

Otherwise you have a performance penalty, as you may have read here already.

At this blog there is a comprehensive guide and he is also providing a performance test tool.

HTH

Sarnowak

Hi, I have been struggling on Pi 4 with this SSD booting.
While Raspbian works just fine, I'm unable to make any downloaded retropie image boot from SSD.

Since I don't have (and don't want to buy) big enough SDCARD, I want to keep ./boot folder on SDCARD and - while booting - redirect root partition to SSD drive.

Anyone please, does this make sense to you?
Was anyone successful with this..
Thanks in advance,
sarah

mitu

@Sarnowak said in How can I boot RetroPie from NVMe or SSD (without SD)?:

While Raspbian works just fine, I'm unable to make any downloaded retropie image boot from SSD.

If you have Raspbian Lite working, then you can install RetroPie manually, the RetroPie Pi4 image is not recent enough to have the updated firmware/eeprom updates to include USB boot.

truglodite

@mitu said in How can I boot RetroPie from NVMe or SSD (without SD)?:

USB only boot is currently in Beta (still testing) for the PI4 - https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2711_bootloader_config.md.

I know this is kind of OT, but I was curious on a pi3 with roms moved to an ssd, how much r/w still happens on the sd?

I ask from the perspective of home automation with homeassistant, where a common setup just uses an sd card, but those sd cards fail quickly with heavy database r/w. The solution there is to move the data partition to ssd, then the sd card is barely ever written to (just during boot) so it lasts forever. I am guessing retropie still will write heavily to the sd card despite roms being on an external, correct? Not sure if sd wear is a big deal with retropie, so figured I'd ask if it was and if there's a similar way to mitigate.

mitu

@truglodite said in How can I boot RetroPie from NVMe or SSD (without SD)?:

I am guessing retropie still will write heavily to the sd card despite roms being on an external, correct? Not sure if sd wear is a big deal with retropie, so figured I'd ask if it was and if there's a similar way to mitigate.

Not really, gaming is not a write-heavy process. Game saves and save states are written to the ROM's folder by default and unpacking .zip ROMs is usually done in RAM.
There is no constant write load using RetroPie, like a monitoring/data collection/aggregation process entails, so a good sdcard and proper power source is usually enough.