12th of December

Today I took the opportunity to upgrade the last Pi in the cluster to Raspberry Pi OS based off Debian bullseye. Its a support node that most of the other nodes in the cluster use to connect to the internet which is why I didn't do it before. Its a Pi4 (2GB) with an external SSD plugged in via a USB3 port.

I took advantage of the Pi's ability to boot from USB devices this time, previously it was using a Micro SD card to boot. After flashing the SSD with a Raspberry Pi OS image I then plugged it into the Pi and off it went. No SD card needed any more. It shows up as device sda and the / and /boot partitions are on there. After that it was a matter of installing the software on it that it previously had, making sure the fstrim service was enabled and its done.

I'm feeling brave so might try and see if the old Pi Drives can also be used to boot off. I don't use them these days. I have a Pi as a storage server but its currently booting off an SD card. I wasn't sure I wanted to try imaging an external HDD in case it bricks it.

The cluster is still running 24/7. My RAC (recent average credit) for the Einstein project has been going up since running the Gamma Ray search tasks. Although they take much longer to run than the BRP4 tasks they give 10 times the credit. Rosetta has also started giving out work so after 3 weeks without any the Pi's that can run them are concentrating on it.

Update

A short while later and yes its possible to flash the Pi Drive and boot off it. It is a lot slower, although it might just be because its plugged into a Pi3 as well as being a slow hard disk.

And I can confirm the Seagate Expansion (desktop) HDD doesn't work. While you can image it the Pi won't boot to it and just hangs.