You can achieve faster storage speeds on a Raspberry Pi by putting your programs on an external drive. Here's how.
How to Run Raspberry Pi 4 or 3 Off an SSD or Flash Drive : Read more
Oh Kay!
I've read thru everyones replies and answers, and I jumped in and started setting up a 512 G SSD on (one of) my Pi(s). I've been using various flavors of linux since kernel v 0.97. I can follow instructions and I understand the boot process fairly well.
That being said....
I was able to get my Pi to boot from the SSD, yet when I resized the partition down to 64G, well I had problems! Even though there was only 7.5 G data written to the SSD, the resizing seemed to foul things up.
I started getting input/output errors running top and that sort of thing. so I rebooted.
THAT did not go well!
Kept getting kernel panics rebooting CPU2 could mount the file system. I went into the recovery and tried to edit the config files to point back to the SD card.
Nothing worked!
Phew!
Bit the bullet and went to reinstall from scratch! Yecch!
Here is the SUPRISE!
When the install screen came up, it gave me the option to install to the SD card or the
SSD!
I figured "WTF?" I've hosed the system, whats a little more time trying it out, right?
Well, It seems to work! It does hit the SD card a bit during boot, but the majority of the action seems to be on the SSD. When the boot is all done, the SSD is mounted as / and the SD (boot) partition is mounted on /boot.
I still have to resize the partitions that Raspian lays out, They don't allow for a real swap partition, and I want one!
So, y eah, I have to go through the whole software update thingy, but, it seems that I've found the "easy" way to install Raspian on an SSD and have the system configure it for you.
Yes, you do need to leave the SD card in, but the speed up is fantastic!