Raspberry Pi Zero 2 boot time? SD card speed?

[FulmenParticipant @fulmen]

OK, so my old Creality CR6 just got a wifi upgrade. It now runs from a Zero2, which works flawlessly except for a 3 minutes boot time. I would like to have it powered from the printer, but for that to work I will need to speed this up a bit. For now I’m running it from an old class 4 SD I had lying about, so what should I replace it with?

[Sonic EscapeParticipant @sonicescape38234]

I think the Raspberry Pi has a built-in SD card test utility to tell you if there is a bottleneck there. Did you try it?

[FulmenParticipant @fulmen]

I had no idea. Does this look like a good place to start?

https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-test-sd-card-speed-on-raspberry-pi

[Sonic EscapeParticipant @sonicescape38234]

Yes, I used the GUI version. But in the end just buy the fastest SD-card you can find. Since I suppose you don’t need a large one they should be cheap.

[FulmenParticipant @fulmen]

That’s the problem, I can’t find any small and fast cards. Right now it’s running fine with 50% disk usage (will monitor that of course) on a 8GB card, and I don’t expect to be running any demanding plugins.

[FulmenParticipant @fulmen]

aaaaaand of course that didn’t work because why not. And I’ve forgotten everything I used to know about linux command line so lets solve this another way.

Raspberry Pi microSD Card Performance Across The Pi Family

A class 4 card should do 4MB/s, the Zero is capable of at least 20. Cutting the boot by a factor of 5 should reduce it to say 40 seconds right? That’s still annoyingly slow…

[NealebParticipant @nealeb]

Small SSD? Seems overkill but might be the best way if speed is a priority. I see regular announcements of small enclosures for RPi cards which include SSD provision so presumably some people think it a good idea!

[Mark RandParticipant @markrand96270]

Pi Zero* can’t talk to an SSD. A faster microSD card will certainly help. Turning off GUI on boot will make it substantially faster. Leaving it on all the time won’t hurt 🙂

[FulmenParticipant @fulmen]

Mark is right, and I’m using both USB ports so I’m stuck with the SD card. AFAIK it doesn’t have any GUI installed at all, just a web server. And I don’t think I’m competent to mess around too much with the system.

Guess I’ll have to keep it running, no biggie but it does add to the cable chaos.

 

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