We are not against USB boot. Only that we need to focus on priorities when developing new functions, and USB is not one of those.
If you’re having corruption issues the FIRST major cause is ALWAYS insufficient power from the power supply. Change it to a better one or with shorter cable.
I would like to add my comments.
A lot has been written/discussed about SD card corruption. I was a bit concerned at first but have now had Vollumio up and in use every day for a month. In our area of France we have had a lot of power supply shutdowns due to flooding and storms over the last week or so. Still no problems with Volumio on SD card. Yesterday, after having read the latest post, I decided to do the best I could to corrupt/destroy my SD card ( after doing a fresh backup and flashing to a spare card ) I connected to the supply via one of those cheap plugin timers - the type that has little pins around the edge of a clock dial. I set it to switch off the supply to my device every 15 mins. or so, then back on again for 15mins. I set this to repeat for about 12 hours. After the test everything is still working perfectly. I realise that I have possibly shortened the life of the SD card but the test proved a point.
If users are having corruption or failure issues then in my opinion they should be looking at other aspects of their build.
Hello,
I try to set up Volumio installed on an SSD, but until now I cannot start from SSD with an installed Volumio image.
Now, I have read, that until know Volumio do not support booting from SSD, but this post is from 2018. What is the current status? Is it planned to implement this feature?
Thanks a lot.
Raymond
We’re not clairvoiyants…it might help if you would tell us which machine you having problems with…
PI, Tinkerboard, perhaps not an arm platform but an x86 (which oneJ??
Good Morning,
you’re right. You’re not a clairvoiyant. But I thought it was clear, because this thread started 2018 with someone who had a problem to setup a raspberry pi 3 and boot from usb. That’s exactly my problem. I flashed the current Volumio image to an SSD, but it doesn’t boot. A current Raspberry Images works fine. So it seems that Volumio still doesn’t support booting from USB, right?
Thanks.
Raymond
the initial answer from Michelangelo is still correct, Volumio cannot boot from usb with a Raspberry PI, so not anything other than an SD card.
Raspbian is a different OS, whereas Volumio is based on Debian (jessie at the moment.
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Hi,
thanks for you reply.
And the reason behind this is? Still lack of resources?
I truly would love to have a possibility to run Volumio from an USB attached SSD. Mainly for the fact, that currently, I do have huge IO-Wait, caused by r/w actions to the SD card. Due to the fact, that reading/writing to an SSD goes way more efficient than to/from an SD card, I would see this as a huge improvement, certainly at startup. Right now, it takes me about 15 minutes to have the volumio web-interface up, due to the fact that I have such an extensive filebase. It would certainly help a lot when things would run from SSD. So, please, let us know, what we can do, so we can help you here?
Did anything change on this subject?
I use Volumio with Nanosound ONE case with M.2 SSD expansion board,
it would be great to have Volumio installed on the M.2 drive.
Will it be ever possible?
Looking at Volumio’s response, it’ s not an easy fix to have it boot from USB. As actually from OS point it’s handled by bootcode.bin file in the boot folder. But I expect this has been tailored (looking at the size) for the best experience with Volumio.
So at this point I could possibly only use the M.2 drive a storage for my music library.
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tested it ( rpi 4 /4g Debian, 3.xx volumio,dac dragonfly )
on a usb stick but volumio is right you gain nothing this was done on a
sandisk extreme pro 3.1 read (max.) 420MB/s / write (max.) 380MB/s
some nice friend rebuild it for testing and yes it worked, you could boot from usb
gaining no speed only few seconds in boot time for the rest it was slower or simulair as a sd version.
Not quite, it’s currently not native supported, but you can do it via Berryboot.
You’ll still need a SD card to boot form, but the original Volumio image can run from USB.
You need:
- Volumio Pi image as a squashfs image
- The USB drive you want to install Volumio on
- a 2nd one to hold the volumio.img file
- Berryboot (older version, so it supports rpi2/3/4 and 32 bit)
Please google for how berryboot works, load a custom image from USB etc.
Not sure if Volumio is looking for support questions as things might not work out of the box.
If they are OK with it, I will create a tutorial.
I’ve tested it and it’s booting. Setup run without any issues. Didn’t do much testing.
- Audio jack not recognized (only HDMI)
- Haven’t been able to test an USB DAC, seems the Pi can’t deliver enough power.
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Well i have about 65000 albums in my mediathek. That meens 65000 covers. If every cover is only 50kB i would need about 3GB of space only for the covers. My roon database for instance is about 20GB.
Now tell me please how to store about 20GB of data in 2, 4 or 8GB RAM? I thik this is impossible! Storing the database on a ssd would definitely speed up the hole usage experience of volumio (escpaxially scrolling through library) and i think this should one of the first priority! There should be at least a possibility to choose a folder or drive where the database shall be saved.
This should be no great task to realise this.
Honestly volumio is rather fast at the backend level, i doubt you could gain significant speed improvements
With SSD over SD card, unless we compare slow SD card to top level SSD disk.
Do you mean “scrolling throught library” as actually scrolling the huge library with mouse wheel or something else? If that’s laggy or slow, it’s the UI not the actual data fetching from backend.
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well i have an sandisk extreme pro and a an old 32gb SSD on my pi. the ssd reads data 4-5 times faster than the sd card (200MB/s to 40-60MB/s) and is cheaper! if you scroll through the library volumio has to read the covers permanently from sd card to show them and nobody can tell me that there is no difference between a slow and a fast device.
i think the team should spent his energy in implemeting an option to choose a database path and not in excuses why it doesn’t work or is impossible. 
thinking, believing or doubting is not knowing! a serious developer should try something out and and not escape into any excuses
Surely the team should focus on priorities affecting large numbers of users rather than a few customers with an unusually large media db.
There is some misconception here.
- Volumio will first try to read a cover file from the album location or artist from the artist folder of your music library
- If it can’t find it, it will try to get it form MusicBrainz and stores this in
/data/albumart/web
Since this location is static on the SD, it’s pretty fail safe, program this behavior’s on some “Unknown” external disc, might introduce unwanted side effects.
Compared to loading it from eMMC vs SD it takes about 5 sec longer for the first page load. After that it can be neglected as Volumio loads faster from SD then I can scroll.
Only on a new fresh install, opening Artist or Album view will take longer, until everything is cashed. But this is a one timer. (I took care of my library with tagging and art)
Should Volumio spend a couple of days programming and testing to win 5 seconds, I wouldn’t do it.
Hopes this gives you a better answer.
(ps back to the original request of this topic, I have been an advocate that Volumio boots from an external device for a long time. But I haven’t had issues with the SD for a year, so also that part is not that important for me anymore)
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Hi there, I know this is a very old thread, but can you remember what SD card you were using? Thanks
Things have changed, development is on its way, see