**Upgrading from SD to USB Drive on Raspberry Pi**

In this article, we will show you how to upgrade your Raspberry Pi from using an SD card as its storage device to a faster and more efficient USB drive. This process is relatively straightforward and requires minimal technical knowledge.

First, let's start with the initial setup. We begin by connecting our USB drive to the Raspberry Pi and making sure it's properly recognized by the system. To do this, we enter the terminal and type in `sudo fdisk -l` to check if the USB drive is detected. In my case, I have a 64 GB SanDisk Ultra USB Drive that was purchased for $7.99 at Best Buy. This drive has an average read speed of 36 MB/s and an average write speed of 15.9 MB/s.

Next, we need to resize our file system to take advantage of the larger storage capacity of the USB drive. We open the `mate terminal` application and type in `sudo resize2fs /dev/sdaX`, where `/dev/sdaX` is the device name of the USB drive. This will prompt us for our password, which we enter before pressing Enter.

The `resize2fs` command takes a few seconds to complete, during which time our system will appear to freeze. However, this is just part of the process and is not a cause for concern. Once the resizing is complete, we can verify that it was successful by typing in `df -h` in the terminal.

**Verification**

Let's take a look at our file system to make sure everything has been resized correctly. We open up the `mate disk utility` application and select the `/dev/sdaX` partition. On my system, I see that the file system is indeed 64 GB in size, with 54 GB available for use. This is exactly what we wanted to achieve by resizing our file system.

Next, we need to make sure that our system can boot from the USB drive. To do this, we open up the `mate terminal` application again and type in `sudo nano /etc/fstab`. This will open up a text editor where we can edit the file system settings.

We navigate to the line that starts with `/dev/sdaX`, which is the device name of our USB drive. We delete the existing line and enter `UUID=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx / ext4 defaults,x-systemd.automount,noatime 0 2` to replace it. The `UUID` field should be replaced with the actual UUID of your USB drive, which can be found by running the command `sudo blkid`.

**Rebooting**

Once we have edited the `/etc/fstab` file, we need to reboot our system to make sure that all changes take effect. We type in `sudo reboot` and wait for the system to complete its shutdown cycle.

After the system has rebooted, we can see that everything is working as expected. The boot message on my screen reads "booting from /dev/sda1". This indicates that our system has successfully booted from the USB drive, which should provide faster performance than using an SD card.

**Testing Performance**

To test the performance of our upgraded system, we can use various benchmarking tools such as `system monitor`, `disk usage`, and `disk speed`. Running these tests will give us a better understanding of how much of a performance boost we can expect from upgrading to a USB drive.

For example, when I run `system monitor` on my Raspberry Pi, I see that the disk read and write speeds are significantly faster than what they were using an SD card. The average read speed is 36 MB/s and the average write speed is 15.9 MB/s.

**Applications**

To take full advantage of our upgraded system, we can install various applications such as `Photoshop`, `Firefox`, and `Minecraft PI`. These applications will give us a better idea of how much faster our system is compared to using an SD card.

In my case, I installed `Photoshop` and was able to open it in just a few seconds, which is significantly faster than what I experienced with the SD card. This demonstrates the performance boost we can expect from upgrading to a USB drive on our Raspberry Pi.

**Conclusion**

Upgrading our Raspberry Pi from an SD card to a USB drive has provided us with a significant performance boost. By following these simple steps, we were able to take advantage of the faster storage speeds offered by USB drives. We also experienced better loading times for applications and a more responsive system overall. If you're looking to upgrade your Raspberry Pi or improve its performance, this is definitely worth trying out.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on guys it's ETA prime back here again and today I want to show you guys how to install Ubuntu mate and run Ubuntu mate 16.04 from your USB Drive on your Raspberry Pi 2 or your Raspberry Pi 3 now the performance increase from going from my sd card to my USB Drive was amazing it feels like a whole new machine and the stability is amazing with it so I've been trying to do this for at least a year and I've never been able to successfully get this to work correctly I had a viewer explain it to me he actually wrote step for step in the comment section on a video I made about installing Ubuntu mate 1604 and he explained it to me I went back to my computer I did the steps and it works amazing so I'm gonna share this with you because he shared it with me I got permission from him it's Marshall acres junior was my viewer who told me how to do this and he is awesome for letting me know because I have scoured the Internet and every tutorial I have found something went wrong and it just didn't work this is easy it's really really simple to get this done if you've installed Ubuntu mate running it from your SD card you will probably be able to do this from your USB easily I have a text file down below in the description that you can download from my Dropbox and it is step 4 step everything you need to know and everything you need to do to get this running from your USB Drive you still need an SD card because the Raspberry Pi doesn't have a traditional BIOS and we can't tell it to boot from the USB automatically so you can use a small SD card a slow SD card work and the USB drive needs to be pretty quick to see a increase in performance so what I have here is a sand disc 64 gigabyte USB 3.0 it's a SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0 and it makes the world of difference running it in a boom to mate let's get started here first thing you're going to need is win32 disk imager the link is in the description I always download SD car formatter just in case something goes wrong and I need to reformat my SD card or my USB Drive and you're going to need the UM boon to mate 16.04 image all those links are in the description if you need help downloading them if you can't find it let me know in the comments and I will guide you through so first thing we're going to do is install umbuntu mate to our USB Drive so my USB Drive I renamed it USB 64 gigabyte and it is in Drive I make sure you remember which drive you have your SD card or your USB drive I'm going to open win32diskimager and from here just make sure my eye which is my USB Drive is chose in the device area we're going to click on the blue folder icon and navigate to where you downloaded and extracted your own boon to mate 16.04 disk image file just double click on this I'm going to write it to the USB Drive now this could take a while depending on the speed of your USB Drive so I'm going to fast forward this for you yes you so the right was successful we flashed the image to the USB Drive we now need to open up the USB Drive that we just flashed to it should now be named PI underscore boot when I snap it to the side here I'm going to insert my SD card reader with the SD card that I'm going to use so my SD card is a 16 gigabyte you can use a smaller one if you'd like but we need to rename SD card and we're going to rename it to PI all capital underscore boot now note the drive letter here this is my SD card this is my USB Drive so I'm going to take all of the files and the overlays folder from the USB Drive that I flashed and copy them to my SD card so now that I have everything from my flashed USB Drive copied to my SD card I'm going to close my SD card or my USB Drive sorry we're going to go into the SD card that we just copied all the files to and open up our CMD line our command line right click I recommend using notepad plus plus it organizes everything I will leave a link of the description you can use your regular notepad but stuff may be jumbled up and garbled and it's just hard to navigate to where you need to go so here is my config text so here is my CMD line from the SD card we just want to go right over to where it says dev /m MCB lk0 p2 and change the MMC blk 0 p2 we want to change it to SD a to file/save so now that you have changed the line on the SD card we are going to the raspberry pi now we're going to insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi and the USB Drive that we flashed on boom - mate - you need both the USB Drive and the SD card in the Raspberry Pi so I have the USB stick I just created and the SD card inserted into the Raspberry Pi we are going to install and boom - mate like normal so just follow your on-screen prompts after it is done installing it will reboot and we'll be ready to get into terminal and make our USB stick bootable we'll have way faster write speeds and it's so worth it guys the stability is amazing just follow along with the on-screen prompts to install and boom - mate setup your language your location your keyboard your name and password you okay so your Ambu to mate is now installed it's running from the SD card now but we are going to make it run from the USB Drive we can get a lot faster read and write speeds from the USB Drive and it is way more stable I use this I had it on all night from yesterday about five o'clock till this morning on another install that I did and it was really fast and I had no problems it just stayed on and I actually was able to use image editing software that you can download and it was really fast I was very surprised I was actually working with a 4000 by 4000 canvas sheet and just trying to see if I could freeze it up and it just kept going I mean I put 17 layers and it just it fell amazing so let's get started here we have a couple things we need to do we need to go to applications system tools mate terminal and from here there's a couple things we have to finish up before we can start running from the USB Drive we're going to type in sudo eff disk space forward slash dev /s da type in the password you set up a boon to mate with press ENTER now we're in the disk utility built into an boon to mate from here press P for partition enter D for delete press enter 2 for the second partition enter in for new partition P for primary to enter now here if you look back at the /dev /s da 2 the start mount mine starts with 1 3 3 1 2 0 so whatever this says here you need to type it in right here 1 3 3 1 2 0 enter press ENTER again press W enter from here we need to reboot we can just type in sudo reboot or you can go to the top right hand corner and reboot from there you so now that we're rebooted again we need to resize our file system so we'll go to applications system tools mate terminal and we'll just type in sudo resize to F s space /dev /s da - it will prompt you for your password put your password in and press Enter so we resize our USB Drive let's make sure by typing a DF space H enter now we can see our dev route 58 gigabytes used 3.5 available 54 I have a 64 gigabyte USB drive so this seems correct to me one more thing in order to make this work sudo space nano space /e TC /f stab press Enter now from within here you need to use your arrow keys to navigate where it says M mm mm c b lk 0 p 2 we want to delete this line and we just want to change it to SDA to ctrl X Y for yes and enter now if you'd like to reboot you can I'm going to reboot one more time so I'll just type in sudo reboot and we are now running from our USB Drive everything's going to be faster from loading apps to loading webpages this is because the USB Drive that I'm using is much faster than my SD card and they're relatively cheaper and they last longer the SD card I've heard rumors that they have a limited number of writes before the SD card is destroyed I know now that you can go out and buy a really fast SD card but I picked up my SanDisk Ultra 64 gigabyte USB Drive for $7.99 at Best Buy it was a few weeks ago they were on sale they go on sale a lot and it's a pretty fast s USB Drive so but if you want to test your speeds applications accessories discs so I have a average read of 36 and an average write of 15.9 megabytes I'll close this system tools mate system monitor file system we have our boot which is our SD card now this can be a smaller SD card and I have my dev route which is my 64 gigabyte SD our USB Drive so yeah everything is faster um let's see here let me download a few applications we ought to welcome our the software or work I'll need to connect to the internet to do this I'll be right back I'll be connected to the Internet and I'll show you some speed we I just wanted to show you guys how fast everything loads now I just installed I rebooted my system I set up my Wi-Fi if you have Bluetooth you can set up your Bluetooth also because 16.04 supports Wi-Fi and bluetooth on the Raspberry Pi three applications games minecraft PI and create world and if you've ever used minecraft pi you know how long this can take building a terrain takes forever on an SD card but we are already in ready to play I will exit out of here and I'll load for the first time which image editor I used to use it before I was able to get Photoshop and I use it on my PC and it took forever to load so we're going to load it now I just remember sitting there like please hurry up and start hurry up and start on my Windows machine which back then it did it had a three gigahertz Core 2 Duo and it still took forever to load as you can see everything is very smooth quit discard changes I'll go ahead and open up Firefox so that's it guys this is the best way to run your own boo to mate on the raspberry pi 2 or the raspberry pi 3 run it from a USB Drive they're super cheap and you can get a really small 64 gigabyte for very inexpensive from Best Buy or Amazon just make sure it's got a good fast write and read speed and you should be fine one thing I did notice was if I insert another USB Drive into my Raspberry Pi and then reboot I get an error I get an error that tells me that it can't boot all you need to do is when you reboot your Raspberry Pi just make sure the only USB stick in the pie is the one you're booting from super simple guys appreciate you guys watching and thanks to one of my viewers who gave me this tutorial he is awesome I want to say thank you very much because I've been trying to do this for a long time and I haven't been able to and the performance increase is amazing next video guys I'll show you how to overclock the Raspberry Pi 3 running a boo to mate so you can squeeze a little extra juice out of this if you have any comments leave them down below or send me a private message if you have any requests let me know and like always thanks for watchinghey what's going on guys it's ETA prime back here again and today I want to show you guys how to install Ubuntu mate and run Ubuntu mate 16.04 from your USB Drive on your Raspberry Pi 2 or your Raspberry Pi 3 now the performance increase from going from my sd card to my USB Drive was amazing it feels like a whole new machine and the stability is amazing with it so I've been trying to do this for at least a year and I've never been able to successfully get this to work correctly I had a viewer explain it to me he actually wrote step for step in the comment section on a video I made about installing Ubuntu mate 1604 and he explained it to me I went back to my computer I did the steps and it works amazing so I'm gonna share this with you because he shared it with me I got permission from him it's Marshall acres junior was my viewer who told me how to do this and he is awesome for letting me know because I have scoured the Internet and every tutorial I have found something went wrong and it just didn't work this is easy it's really really simple to get this done if you've installed Ubuntu mate running it from your SD card you will probably be able to do this from your USB easily I have a text file down below in the description that you can download from my Dropbox and it is step 4 step everything you need to know and everything you need to do to get this running from your USB Drive you still need an SD card because the Raspberry Pi doesn't have a traditional BIOS and we can't tell it to boot from the USB automatically so you can use a small SD card a slow SD card work and the USB drive needs to be pretty quick to see a increase in performance so what I have here is a sand disc 64 gigabyte USB 3.0 it's a SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0 and it makes the world of difference running it in a boom to mate let's get started here first thing you're going to need is win32 disk imager the link is in the description I always download SD car formatter just in case something goes wrong and I need to reformat my SD card or my USB Drive and you're going to need the UM boon to mate 16.04 image all those links are in the description if you need help downloading them if you can't find it let me know in the comments and I will guide you through so first thing we're going to do is install umbuntu mate to our USB Drive so my USB Drive I renamed it USB 64 gigabyte and it is in Drive I make sure you remember which drive you have your SD card or your USB drive I'm going to open win32diskimager and from here just make sure my eye which is my USB Drive is chose in the device area we're going to click on the blue folder icon and navigate to where you downloaded and extracted your own boon to mate 16.04 disk image file just double click on this I'm going to write it to the USB Drive now this could take a while depending on the speed of your USB Drive so I'm going to fast forward this for you yes you so the right was successful we flashed the image to the USB Drive we now need to open up the USB Drive that we just flashed to it should now be named PI underscore boot when I snap it to the side here I'm going to insert my SD card reader with the SD card that I'm going to use so my SD card is a 16 gigabyte you can use a smaller one if you'd like but we need to rename SD card and we're going to rename it to PI all capital underscore boot now note the drive letter here this is my SD card this is my USB Drive so I'm going to take all of the files and the overlays folder from the USB Drive that I flashed and copy them to my SD card so now that I have everything from my flashed USB Drive copied to my SD card I'm going to close my SD card or my USB Drive sorry we're going to go into the SD card that we just copied all the files to and open up our CMD line our command line right click I recommend using notepad plus plus it organizes everything I will leave a link of the description you can use your regular notepad but stuff may be jumbled up and garbled and it's just hard to navigate to where you need to go so here is my config text so here is my CMD line from the SD card we just want to go right over to where it says dev /m MCB lk0 p2 and change the MMC blk 0 p2 we want to change it to SD a to file/save so now that you have changed the line on the SD card we are going to the raspberry pi now we're going to insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi and the USB Drive that we flashed on boom - mate - you need both the USB Drive and the SD card in the Raspberry Pi so I have the USB stick I just created and the SD card inserted into the Raspberry Pi we are going to install and boom - mate like normal so just follow your on-screen prompts after it is done installing it will reboot and we'll be ready to get into terminal and make our USB stick bootable we'll have way faster write speeds and it's so worth it guys the stability is amazing just follow along with the on-screen prompts to install and boom - mate setup your language your location your keyboard your name and password you okay so your Ambu to mate is now installed it's running from the SD card now but we are going to make it run from the USB Drive we can get a lot faster read and write speeds from the USB Drive and it is way more stable I use this I had it on all night from yesterday about five o'clock till this morning on another install that I did and it was really fast and I had no problems it just stayed on and I actually was able to use image editing software that you can download and it was really fast I was very surprised I was actually working with a 4000 by 4000 canvas sheet and just trying to see if I could freeze it up and it just kept going I mean I put 17 layers and it just it fell amazing so let's get started here we have a couple things we need to do we need to go to applications system tools mate terminal and from here there's a couple things we have to finish up before we can start running from the USB Drive we're going to type in sudo eff disk space forward slash dev /s da type in the password you set up a boon to mate with press ENTER now we're in the disk utility built into an boon to mate from here press P for partition enter D for delete press enter 2 for the second partition enter in for new partition P for primary to enter now here if you look back at the /dev /s da 2 the start mount mine starts with 1 3 3 1 2 0 so whatever this says here you need to type it in right here 1 3 3 1 2 0 enter press ENTER again press W enter from here we need to reboot we can just type in sudo reboot or you can go to the top right hand corner and reboot from there you so now that we're rebooted again we need to resize our file system so we'll go to applications system tools mate terminal and we'll just type in sudo resize to F s space /dev /s da - it will prompt you for your password put your password in and press Enter so we resize our USB Drive let's make sure by typing a DF space H enter now we can see our dev route 58 gigabytes used 3.5 available 54 I have a 64 gigabyte USB drive so this seems correct to me one more thing in order to make this work sudo space nano space /e TC /f stab press Enter now from within here you need to use your arrow keys to navigate where it says M mm mm c b lk 0 p 2 we want to delete this line and we just want to change it to SDA to ctrl X Y for yes and enter now if you'd like to reboot you can I'm going to reboot one more time so I'll just type in sudo reboot and we are now running from our USB Drive everything's going to be faster from loading apps to loading webpages this is because the USB Drive that I'm using is much faster than my SD card and they're relatively cheaper and they last longer the SD card I've heard rumors that they have a limited number of writes before the SD card is destroyed I know now that you can go out and buy a really fast SD card but I picked up my SanDisk Ultra 64 gigabyte USB Drive for $7.99 at Best Buy it was a few weeks ago they were on sale they go on sale a lot and it's a pretty fast s USB Drive so but if you want to test your speeds applications accessories discs so I have a average read of 36 and an average write of 15.9 megabytes I'll close this system tools mate system monitor file system we have our boot which is our SD card now this can be a smaller SD card and I have my dev route which is my 64 gigabyte SD our USB Drive so yeah everything is faster um let's see here let me download a few applications we ought to welcome our the software or work I'll need to connect to the internet to do this I'll be right back I'll be connected to the Internet and I'll show you some speed we I just wanted to show you guys how fast everything loads now I just installed I rebooted my system I set up my Wi-Fi if you have Bluetooth you can set up your Bluetooth also because 16.04 supports Wi-Fi and bluetooth on the Raspberry Pi three applications games minecraft PI and create world and if you've ever used minecraft pi you know how long this can take building a terrain takes forever on an SD card but we are already in ready to play I will exit out of here and I'll load for the first time which image editor I used to use it before I was able to get Photoshop and I use it on my PC and it took forever to load so we're going to load it now I just remember sitting there like please hurry up and start hurry up and start on my Windows machine which back then it did it had a three gigahertz Core 2 Duo and it still took forever to load as you can see everything is very smooth quit discard changes I'll go ahead and open up Firefox so that's it guys this is the best way to run your own boo to mate on the raspberry pi 2 or the raspberry pi 3 run it from a USB Drive they're super cheap and you can get a really small 64 gigabyte for very inexpensive from Best Buy or Amazon just make sure it's got a good fast write and read speed and you should be fine one thing I did notice was if I insert another USB Drive into my Raspberry Pi and then reboot I get an error I get an error that tells me that it can't boot all you need to do is when you reboot your Raspberry Pi just make sure the only USB stick in the pie is the one you're booting from super simple guys appreciate you guys watching and thanks to one of my viewers who gave me this tutorial he is awesome I want to say thank you very much because I've been trying to do this for a long time and I haven't been able to and the performance increase is amazing next video guys I'll show you how to overclock the Raspberry Pi 3 running a boo to mate so you can squeeze a little extra juice out of this if you have any comments leave them down below or send me a private message if you have any requests let me know and like always thanks for watching\n"