Successfully Adding an External USB Drive to Raspberry Pi 4

General
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After spending hours researching and troubleshooting, I finally managed to add an external USB drive to my Raspberry Pi 4 for storing video files from MotionEye and other data. Here’s my journey and the solution I found:

Initially, I struggled with formatting the drive correctly and ensuring it would mount permanently. I tried several methods, including using different file systems and automount scripts, but nothing seemed to work consistently across reboots.

The breakthrough came when I discovered a straightforward guide that explained how to format the USB drive with ext4 and set up a persistent mount point using /etc/fstab. Here’s what I did:

  1. Formatting the Drive: I used sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 to format the USB drive. It’s important to note that /dev/sda1 should be replaced with your actual device identifier.

  2. Mounting Permanently: I created a mount point with sudo mkdir /mnt/usbdrive and added an entry to /etc/fstab to ensure the drive mounts at boot. The entry looked like this:
    bash
    UUID=XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX /mnt/usbdrive ext4 defaults 0 2

  3. Testing the Setup: After rebooting, I checked if the drive was mounted using df -h and was thrilled to see it listed under /mnt/usbdrive.

This setup has been working flawlessly for weeks now, allowing me to store all my video data without worrying about storage issues. I hope this helps anyone else facing similar challenges!

Happy automating! :rocket: