But if you don’t care about the explanations, ignore them follow the steps inside the code blocks. I hope this approach will be useful to others as well, an alternative to the typical “copy and paste tutorial” that invites copying command lines from a blog into a terminal window without thinking about what they mean. Another aim is to highlight stark differences between Mac OS and Linux, using Raspbian as a proxy for Linux. This is done primarily for my benefit - as a learning exercise my aim here is to explain the steps required to execute this task under Raspbian. Rather than simply listing the steps in rote fashion, this recipe includes some background and context. However, as performance is typically secondary to portability for USB flash drives, the FAT file system seems appropriate. Note however that while the FAT file system is ubiquitous, it does not compare particularly well performance-wise against other, more modern file systems.

This recipe utilizes one of the so-called FAT file systems, chosen because of its compatibility with virtually all modern operating systems. USB flash drives are block storage devices which implies that they will be formatted IAW a particular file system. AKA “thumb drives”, these are small, portable data storage devices typically used for data transfer. Create an entry in /etc/fstab to automount the USB driveįollowing is a procedure to mount a USB Flash Drive on a Raspberry Pi. Determine what drives are currently connected to the RPi I can read from it, and write to it immediately!

But all of these instructions! Why is this so complicated? On my Mac, I plug the drive in, and it just works.

Why would I want to do connect an external drive?.

If you’d like to add anything, please feel free to fork and issue a pull request - or simply open an issue. Until that happens, most of the following remains accurate and pertinent. As systemd has now become “mainstream”, the recipe must be revised accordingly. NOTE: The current recipe here does not consider potential differences due to the adoption of systemd. How To Connect a USB Flash Drive to Raspberry Pi?

How to format usb drive on raspberry pi