Umbrel on NVMe drives

Guides
1

For those of you who, like me, are new to Umbrel and purchased a Pi5 and an NVMe SSD, you will likely be struggling to get the OS installed and running. I hope to save you many hours of frustration trying to figure it out, especially if you’re a novice user.

Equipment I used:
Pi5 8G
Pi OEM Power Supply
WD Black SN770 2T NVMe SSD
PCIe to SSD M.2 Board (I used this one: Geekworm 1002)
Case of your choice
Note that the board you select may interfere with the cooling unit of your case, so shop around.

SUMMARY

That should do it! Hope this helps save everyone as much pain as I had trying to figure all this out not nowing that Umbrel 1.x did not yet support NVMe SSDs.

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2

UPDATE: Since I wrote the above guide, Umbrel has pulled code for a CURL install, so for step 3, you will have to flash the Umbrel package directly to an SSD rather than PiOS. Once you apply the changes outlined in the instructions, remove the mSD and the Pi will boot directly from your SSD, and you can then proceed with the install via IP.

3

Thank you i am
A novice and i had Umbrel installed on my ras 5 with a hdd usb linked. Due to performance and noise decided to upgrade to nvme and i am waiting for it.
i hope i’ll be able to do so; i will follow your guide. I was hoping for smth simple :frowning:

4

Hey guys we just shipped official support for this in umbrelOS, you can try the public beta here: Release umbrelOS 1.2 Beta 1 · getumbrel/umbrel · GitHub

5

Awesome! Wondering if you can advise how to start from scratch with 1.2b1 without losing my blockchain download and installed apps.

6

If you’ve already done a custom install on your Pi 5 to get it working before official support then migrating the data would take a few steps.

  • Stop Umbrel from running
  • Create a tarball of the installation directory (usually /home/umbrel/umbrel on official installs but you may have installed elsewhere)
  • Copy the tarball somewhere else safe not on your SSD
  • Flash the umbrelOS beta onto the NVMe SSD
  • Stop Umbrel (sudo systemctl stop umbrel)
  • Extract your previous backup tarball to /home/umbrel/umbrel
  • Start Umbrel again with sudo systemctl start umbrel

The Umbrel data directory contains all apps and settings, as long as that one directory is backed up, you have everything and can recover your data on a new Umbrel by replacing it’s data directory with your previous one.

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