Review on 💾 JOIOT Portable SSD External Solid State Drive - 120GB USB 3.1 Type C SSD with 400MB/S Data Transfer by Norman Costello

This drive is pretty fast! I run my Raspberry Pi 4 with it and am very happy with it. Note that you can't LOAD the Pi, but you can get the next best thing. You can boot the RPi from there, but you will need to do an initial boot from the SD card. However, once loaded, all disk access occurs on the SD card. A few things to note: 1) This disk is a 4K sector disk. This means that simply writing the SD card image using RPI Imager or Win32 Disk Imager WILL NOT SUCCESS. You seem to be expecting blocks of 512 bytes. It simply writes the corrupted file system to disk. 2) After downloading it works fine. 3) I've tried everything I can think of, but RPI4 WILL NOT boot from this device for some reason. 4) All is not lost - you can move your file system to an SSD and reap the benefits of speed and durability. However, you must book from an SD card. I've tried all ways to boot from it, but I couldn't get it to work. I even manually created a FAT32 boot partition and a copy of the ext4 root filesystem by hand and it didn't boot. Here's how I got it working. Steps on the Raspberry Pi: Delete the original partition on the SSD and create a new ext4 partition with gparted (gparted should be installed by default). Mount the ext4 partition of the SSD (I used /mnt/target). Copy the current OS partition to the newly created one on the SSD. (I used "sudo rsync -axv //mnt/target"). On my pi4B it takes about 5 minutes. Get the PARTUUID of the just copied ext 4 SSD partition. (I used "sudo blkid" and found the PARTUUID for the partition in /dev/sda) Copy /boot/cmdline.txt to cmdline.sd Edit /boot/cmdline.txt and replace the PARTUUID with the that you just found for the partition you created on /dev/sdaX, edit fstab **ON SSD** and replace PARTUUID for / with the SSID you just specified in cmdline.txt. (I used "sudo vi /mnt/target/etc/fstab".) Don't edit the regular /dev/fstab! Because of the above change, it never shows up. Again! Edit fstab on the SSD filesystem you just created. me for a while. Search the Raspberry Pi forums for more information and detailed instructions.