thagrol, do you have anything to ay about whether to choose a SD card or a USB flash drive? Is it just a matter of personal preference or convenience?
That's a tricky one.
A lot depends on the quality of the SD card and the quality of USB drive. A USB 3 drive is likely to be faster (at least for reads) than an SD card but I can't really say more than that as I've done no testing.
Most of my Pi boot from SD card, the exception being my Pi5 (booting from NVMe - that's definitely faster), my CM4 based NAS (SD card for boot partition, root partition on a SATA connected SSD), and a handful of zeros that boot over the USB ethernet gadget.
My main reasons for suggesting a USB flash drive to you were that, at least in the UK, you can pick a suitably sized one up from your nearest large supermarket and that you don't need an SD card reader when using one.
IIRC the 4B can boot from uSD, USB mass storage, and (for those who need it) as a USB device on its USB C port though I wouldn't recommend the last one for normal use.
There's been plenty of discussion on the merits of the various options so try a forum search.
Though I'm sure others in this thread will have their own opinions too.
Statistics: Posted by thagrol — Fri Mar 07, 2025 6:47 pm