Should you’re trying 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 the best way 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 File) [format] as a substitute of GPT (GUID Partition Desk),” Corey explains. “I wrote these directions to make use of GPT, as a substitute. I’m utilizing a 4TB Workforce Group NVMe SSD with a Pineberry Pi Backside Pi HAT.”
Should you’re trying to get high-capacity storage strapped to your Raspberry Pi 5, chances are you’ll want to leap by means of a number of hoops first. (📷: Gareth Halfacree)
The Raspberry Pi 5 launched late final yr as the primary mainstream mannequin within the single-board laptop vary to supply a user-accessible PCI Categorical lane — supreme 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 not too long ago SupTronics.
No matter which mannequin you select, when you 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 at the moment are accessible, 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 become a brand new picture which might be written onto the goal NVMe drive — and compressed for ease of storage, must you wish to preserve it secure for future OS installations. “[The] MBR2GPT command does NOT work,” Corey writes of the explanation 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 on the market on Reddit. “I provide the next with no guarantee,” the tinkerer writes. “There could also be typos. Your discretion is suggested.”
