If you happen to’re trying to run your working system from some high-capacity high-speed storage in your Raspberry Pi 5, you may want extra than simply an M.2 NVMe HAT+ accent: you may must know find out how 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.
“If you happen to picture a disk which is bigger than 2TB with the Raspberry Pi instruments or [disk] photographs, your disk can be restricted to 2TB as a result of they use MBR (Grasp Boot Document) [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 Staff Group NVMe SSD with a Pineberry Pi Backside Pi HAT.”
If you happen to’re trying to get high-capacity storage strapped to your Raspberry Pi 5, it’s possible you’ll want to leap by way of just a few 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 — 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 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 format on a microSD Card utilizing the newer GPT format.
Quite a few M.2 HAT+ boards at the moment are obtainable, although Raspberry Pi’s official model continues to be pending. (📷: Waveshare)
This partition format is then populated with information from Raspberry Pi Imager, edited to level to the NVMe drive relatively 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, must you need 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 units which are not enumerated with the ‘sd{a-z}‘ label.”
Corey’s full information is accessible on Reddit. “I provide the next with no guarantee,” the tinkerer writes. “There could also be typos. Your discretion is suggested.”