Boot Your Pi 3 B+ From USB

Configure and boot up your Raspberry Pi3B+ using a USB flash or hard drive

This tutorial explains how to take a USB mass-storage device, such as a flash drive or hard drive and boot up your Raspberry Pi 3 B+ using it. Once everything’s configured, there’s no longer any need to use an SD card – it can be removed and used in another Raspberry Pi. The benefits of this are that you can increase the overall storage size of the Pi from a standard 4GB-8GB to upwards of 500GB. A further benefit is that the robustness and reliability of a USB storage device is far greater than an SD card, so this increases the longevity of your data.

Before you begin, please note that this setup is still experimental and is developing all the time. Bear in mind too that it doesn’t work with all USB mass-storage devices; you can learn more about why and view compatible devices at www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pi-3booting-part-i-usb-mass-storage-boot.

01 How it works

This setup involves booting the Raspberry Pi from the SD card and then altering the config.txt file in order to set the option to enable USB boot mode. This in turn changes a setting in the One Time Programmable (OTP) memory in the Raspberry Pi’s system-on-a-chip, and enables booting from a USB device. Once set you can remove the SD card for good. Please note that that any changes you make to the OTP are permanent, so ensure that you use a suitable Raspberry Pi – for example, one that you know will always be able to be hooked up to the USB drive rather than one you might take on the road.

02 Download the latest OS image