Booting from SSD
Presuming that you’ve chosen Raspbian, let’s get you up and running with a system that boots from microSD and immediately jumps to an external SSD for storing and running the bulk of the OS. Note that for older models (anything but the Pi 4), USB booting is easier to set up (just add the line program_usb_bootmode=1 to /boot/config.txt on a Raspbian SD card, then reboot with said microSD card and your external drive attached to write the change to firmware). See http://bit.ly/LXF260boot for info.
IMPROVING HARDWARE
“The USB and Ethernet ports no longer share the same bus”
One day, booting the Pi 4 from external storage will be simple, but for now we’ll have to settle for pivoting to the root filesystem. Start by downloading the latest fully loaded version of Raspbian. Unzip, then head to to get the latest version of balena Etcher, a super-simple disk imager. Write the Raspbian image not to your microSD card, but to that USB drive – you will, it goes without saying, lose everything that’s on there, so don’t wipe a drive full of beloved content. Do the same thing again, but write the image to your SD card this time.
