Please excuse any grammatical errors. I used a tool to generate the transcript and haven’t had a chance to read through it yet. ✔️
The default boot order on the Raspberry Pi is to first boot from the micro SD card, which is less than ideal if you would like to boot from a USB drive first. So, in today’s video, I’m going to cover how you can change the boot order on your Raspberry Pi.
To begin, you will need Raspberry Pi Imager. For this, if you’ve never used it before, check out my video linked on the screen now and down below where I go over the basics and how to install it.
Once you open Raspberry Pi Imager, select “Choose OS”, scroll down, and select “Miscellaneous utility images”, and select “Bootloader”. Then, select the option for USB boot which boot from USB if available, otherwise boot from SD card, which is exactly what we want.
So, once you select that, the next step is to choose a storage device. For this example, I’ll be using a Micro SD card, but make sure whatever medium you decide to use, you don’t have any data stored on it that you need to keep because this process will completely erase it.
So, at this point, connect the SD card to your computer. Once that’s connected, select “Choose storage”, select your storage device, and then before we click “Write”, just double-check that you have USB boot as the operating system, the correct storage device is selected, and then go ahead and click “Write” again. Just a warning that all existing data will be erased. Are you sure you want to continue? Yes.
The USB boot image is very small, so this should take less than 30 seconds. Once it does finish, you can select “Continue”, and we can now remove our storage device from our computer.
So, at this point, we now have our Raspberry Pi. I’m going to go ahead and insert the micro SD card into it, and now the next step will be to power it up. I’m just going to switch my camera to my computer screen so you can see what it looks like. If you don’t have a monitor to connect your Raspberry Pi to, that’s perfectly fine. Just power up your Raspberry Pi, let it sit for 30 seconds, and you should be all set.
As you’ll see in a moment on my screen, the Raspberry Pi will power up from an image we just flashed to our micro SD card, and the bootloader will be reconfigured to boot from the USB drive first and the micro SD card second.
So, at this point, I have my Raspberry Pi connected to my monitor, and I have the micro SD card inserted in the Raspberry Pi. I’m now going to power up the Raspberry Pi.
Once the green screen shows up, that means that the boot order has been successfully reconfigured, and now our Raspberry Pi will boot from USB first and micro SD card second. If you enjoyed this video, I think you’ll like the top one listed here, and the bottom one has been automatically selected for you.
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Raspberry Pi Imager makes it easy to install a variety of operating systems onto your micro SD card, external SSD, or whatever other medium you choose to install your operating system on for your Raspberry Pi. They make it super easy to install. You can head on over to raspberry pi.com. Once you get there, select “Software” and then, depending on which operating system you are running, select that download. In my case, download for Windows.
Once the download finishes, open it. Do you want to allow this app? Yes, follow the prompts. Once that finishes, select “Finish.” There is one setting I like to change before I use it. The setting I like to change is located in the advanced settings. To access that on Windows, you need to hit Ctrl, Shift, and X on your keyboard, and you should see this screen pop up. Once this shows up, I change this to “Always use,” and then I scroll down to the bottom, and the setting labeled “Enabled Telemetry,” I uncheck that and then select “Save.”
The detail on the GitHub page, which I will link down below, explains what Telemetry is collected, the URL, operating system name, and category if present, of a selected image are sent along with the running version of Raspberry Pi Imager, your operating system, CPU architecture, local, and Raspberry Pi revision if applicable to this URL. And then they go over the web service that it’s sent to, where it’s hosted and why they do it, which is to allow them to query the number of downloads over time and nothing else. I personally don’t think there’s anything malicious about the Telemetry they want to collect, but since the option is easily accessible, I like to disable it.
So, at this point, you can now browse the OS’s that are available to install through the tool. They have the default Raspberry Pi OS, a popular section I like to use, as well as other general-purpose OS. In here, they have Ubuntu, which is what I’ll be using in my demonstrations in future videos. They have some useful options under “Miscellaneous Utility Images” and under “Bootloader.” From here, you can change the boot order of your device. So, if you want to boot from USB before SD card, you can configure that from here.
I just wanted to give a quick overview of what this software offers. In a future video, I’ll walk through the install and booting up of our freshly installed OS on our Raspberry Pi. If you enjoyed this video, I think you’ll like the top one here, and the machines think you’ll like the bottom one.
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In today’s video, I wanted to cover the hardware components on the Raspberry Pi. Understanding what you are working with is helpful and I find it impressive what they have managed to cram on this circuit board. Towards the end of the video, I will suggest an upgrade if you plan to use it for full-time hosting. On the top right, we have a gigabit Ethernet port, which supports true gigabit Ethernet speeds. The Ethernet transceiver chip on the Raspberry Pi allows you to achieve full gigabit speeds of 1000 megabits per second, compared to the Raspberry Pi 3, which was limited to 300 megabits per second. Below the Ethernet port, we have two USB 3.0 ports and two USB 2.0 ports. On the side view, we can see the Ethernet port in the center and two USB 3.0 ports (which have blue inside) and two USB 2.0 ports (black) on the left. Below the Ethernet controller, we have the USB controller chip. On the previous Raspberry Pi 3, the Ethernet and USB controller were on the same chip, causing the limitation of 300 megabits per second on the gigabit Ethernet interface.
Now, that’s broken up into two separate chips, which allows for USB 3.0 and the true gigabit Ethernet port. So now, if we continue on our way around the board, here we have a four-pole stereo output jack, which is handy if you want to connect headphones or some other external speaker. To the left of that, we have a CSI camera port. This is something I’ve never actually used, but if you wanted to connect an external web camera, if you use this as a desktop replacement, that’s what that port could be used for. To the left of that, we have two micro HDMI ports, which means that this board does support dual displays, which again is impressive for something so small. If you only use a single monitor, then this board can support 4K at 60 frames per second. If you use the dual display option, it can support two monitors at 4K 30 frames per second. Now, to the left of the micro HDMI ports, we have a USBC port, and this is used to provide power to the Raspberry Pi. Now, returning to the top of the board, here we have a DSi display port, this is something I’ve never used. And, continuing up to the top left, we have a radio frequency shielded module that provides Dual Band Wi-Fi 2.4 and 5 gigahertz. It provides 802.11 BGN and AC along with Bluetooth 5.0 and Bluetooth LE. So, if you don’t have a nearby Ethernet port, you can still use the wireless adapter and have internet access. It’s also helpful if you use this as a desktop computer replacement; you can connect a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse to it. Above that, we have this black bar with 40 pins in it; this is a 40-pin GPIO header, you likely won’t be using this. And next to that, we have a grouping of four pins, and this is used for PoE. There’s an extra module you can purchase, which is a PoE hat, and what that allows you to do is use PoE with the Raspberry Pi. PoE stands for power over Ethernet, so what that does is, once you plug in the PoE hat to the Raspberry Pi, you can now plug in an Ethernet cable, and if your switch supports PoE, then that singular cable can provide both network connectivity and power to the Raspberry Pi, and you don’t need to use the USBC port to power it.
So, in the center, we have the “star of the show.” This is a 64-bit quad-core Arm Cortex A72 processor clocked at 1.5 gigahertz. This processor has been more than enough for small projects. To the right of the CPU, we have DDR4 SD RAM. This will vary in size depending on the Raspberry Pi purchased. This one has 4GB of RAM, but it can range from 2GB to 8GB. This concludes the top of the board.
Moving to the bottom, there’s one component to highlight: the Micro SD card slot. This is commonly used to store the OS and related files. To upgrade, the author suggests using an NVMe SSD instead of the Micro SD card. You’ll need an NVMe SSD and an enclosure to plug the SSD in, then connect it to the Raspberry Pi via USB. This author uses it for a Mastodon server on a Raspberry Pi. You’ll still need a Micro SD card for initial setup, but once that’s done, the OS and data will be stored on the NVMe SSD. The reason for this upgrade is that Micro SD cards can be unreliable with large amounts of reading and writing. If a modern SD card fails, it goes into read-only mode to protect data.
I actually experienced this twice when I was setting up my Mastodon server. I tried to use only a Micro SD card, but when I installed the ruby gems, which required a high number of reads and writes, the SD cards went into read-only mode and I could no longer use them. Since I upgraded to the M.2 SSD, I haven’t had any issues and it’s been running reliably. I’ll link both the enclosure and the NVMe SSD below if you’re interested in purchasing them. I bought both from Amazon, the bookstore run by Bezos. The enclosure cost me around $19 and the specific NVMe drive that I bought was $35. There are cheaper drives available, but I like Western Digital, so you can probably pick one up for $15 on the low end. Again, this isn’t a required upgrade, you can still just use the Micro SD card if you prefer, but for reliability’s sake, I would suggest making the upgrade. There were some comments on my last video that said you can get a used old laptop for cheaper. This is likely true, but I like the small form factor and low power consumption of the Raspberry Pi, so I stick with it. The self-hosting guides that I’ll have in the near future can be adapted to whatever hardware you have lying around, but I’ll be demonstrating and performing the installs on a Raspberry Pi. If you made it this far and are not tired of hearing me talk yet, the top video is one I think you’ll enjoy if you liked this one, and the bottom one was chosen for you by the YouTube algorithm.
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They say the best option for privacy is to self host your own data and services. While I do agree the privacy benefits are hard to beat, there are some downsides that I don’t think are discussed enough. Before we get into it, I will be doing a self hosting series in the very near future using a Raspberry Pi, I settled on the Raspberry Pi Because it’s an affordable option for many people compared to purchasing a full fledged server. It’s low power nearly silent, since it’s fanless. And you can get one for between 35 and 100. US dollars, depending on where you buy them from. One of the main benefits of self hosting, especially as someone who talks a lot about privacy is that you own your data and have physical control over it. It’s not uploaded to the cloud encrypted on a server that a company may have access to, you are going to be responsible for it yourself on your own hardware, wherever you decide to plug it in and powered up. I think having that level of control can be liberating, while at the same time terrifying, your data will be stored on a little card like this. That means if you lose it, the card malfunctions, or there’s a natural disaster and it’s destroyed, and you didn’t take a backup or replicate it somewhere your data is gone. And that’s on you. There’s no large corporation ensuring its integrity, and that it’s stored in multiple geographic locations in case of catastrophic failure. Now, while that might sound a bit scary, there’s also something satisfying about knowing that if you want to destroy your data you can and it’s not stored somewhere that you were not aware of.
So as far as privacy goes, self hosting is a big win. Security. That’s a different story. For all intents and purposes, you will be a systems administrator, patches, updates, upgrades configurations, the security we all take for granted when we upload our data to a billion or trillion dollar company is now your responsibility. This goes back to where I mentioned that at least some part of you has to be okay with tinkering and troubleshooting. This won’t be a set it and forget it sort of thing, you’ll have to maintain it and take care of it. It also sounds like I’m talking about a pet. Modern day expectations are that services are available 24/7 365 As someone who has worked for a hosting company, I don’t think most people realize the level of effort and resources it takes to get five nines of uptime. When you self host you’re at the mercy of your internet service provider and Power Company. Maybe the power goes out for 10 seconds, which normally wouldn’t be a big deal. But now your server was powered off and you need to turn it on and login again. Maybe you had a battery backup so you’re good for short outages. But what if you live somewhere like Florida and the power’s out for weeks. I also heard that some ISPs have rules about hosting services out of your home, even if they are for personal use. I’ve never had any issues in the United States. But I don’t know how that works in other countries. An easy way to avoid some of the hardware power and internet failures I just mentioned would be to rent a VPS from a cloud provider. There are some pretty affordable ones out there. But for now on this channel, I’m going to focus on hosting out of your home.
With the doom and gloom out of the way. I’ll be doing various demonstrations in the coming months on configurations and services. If you have the money, I would suggest getting at least two Raspberry Pi’s with extra SD cards so that you can have one to mess around with and one to host your data. It’s also useful to have one as a backup in case your main one has a hardware issue. The goal of this was not to demotivate you. That’s the last thing I want, especially since I’ll be making videos on it in the near future. I just want to make sure that you’re aware of the added responsibility you’ll have before embarking on this.
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