Comment by eriknstr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eriknstr | Hacker News Reader

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>I've configured it to boot off of the Hard Drive. You don't even need an SD card in it to boot.

Woah, that's awesome! I had no idea the pi 3 could do that.

I have a Raspberry Pi 2 B and a 3 B at home. I host my website using the 2 B with cloudflare in front of it [1], as well as use it as a login server, but every couple of months the SD card gets corrupted. The last time that happened was a couple of weeks ago and since I'm currently away from home there's nothing I can do to fix it until I get back so now my website is down and additionally I can't send data to my desktop computer for backup, though fortunately I have two external drives with me so I can have multiple copies of my data still just not at different physical locations.

Totally going to put the 3 B in charge of my website and have it boot from a USB stick instead of from SD.

Searched and found a post with more details about this from the Raspberry Pi guys: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pi-3-booting-part-i-usb-mas...

[1]: https://github.com/eriknstr/interweb

TIL there's even a PXE boot option on the Pi 3, and several other boot modes as well.

https://github.com/raspberrypi/documentation/tree/master/har...

Sweet! I've been wondering how much work PXE boot would be.

The network boot can be made to work on the RPi 2, I believe. You still need an sd card in there to host the updated boot ROM but it won't be used for anything except booting, so it should be pretty safe from corruption.

> every couple of months the SD card gets corrupted.

You may want to check your power supply before switching to USB storage. In my case, the corrupt SD card turned out to be an issue with the power adapter I bought for the raspi Model 3B. Switching to a better 2A adapter fixed the issue.

I am powering the Raspberry Pi from the usb port of my router and would prefer not to have an additional power adapter. However the SD corruption issues also happened previously when I was using the Raspberry Pi for something else and was using a power adapter.

To be honest I think perhaps the SD card I am using is actually bad. I seem to recall that I lost some photos from the same SD card previously when I used it in a digital camera. So I could also try replacing the SD card if I haven't already but at that point I feel like a USB stick will be just as good anyway.

I intend to configure my Raspberry Pi to not write logs and such to persistent memory in order to reduce wear on the storage since such files are of no interest to me anyway, but haven't gotten around to do so yet. Still the files for my website will be on the USB stick though so therefore I wonder, will the read and write speed be ok even with USB? I think it probably will. Additionally I've been wishing to keep the website files themselves in memory as well (but to write to disk when they are changed ofc) but haven't gotten around to that either.

The only downsides to this setup is it take longer to boot and apps take longer to start. Since I never shut it off booting isn't an issue and from what I've noticed it's only the first time you load an app that is slow. If you quit and restart them they load pretty fast.

This is the forum post I followed to setup the Pi to boot from the HD, I think it may be newer than the one you found:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

Worked like a charm.

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