Element14 DIY Pi Desktop User Manual page 10

Alternatively, you can simply write an image to the mSATA SSD, just as you would
write an image to an SD Card. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has instructions on how
you write images here:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/
Note: If you write an image to your mSATA SSD then the data used and accessible
from the OS will only be of the size of the image written, unless you resize the
partitions.
2) Mounting the mSATA SSD to Access Files
RASPBIAN
The Raspbian OS is based upon Debian Linux, and as such supports the majority of
commands and functions that you would use to mount drives within that OS (these
typically involve fstab - https://wiki.debian.org/fstab, and pmount -
https://wiki.debian.org/pmount ).
From the Graphical User Interface (GUI)
Depending on your version of Raspbian, and how you have it configured, when you
boot your Raspberry Pi to the GUI and then connect the attached mSATA SSD, you
will be prompted what to do with your "Removable media" that has been inserted,
and the drive will be automatically mounted.
It is possible that the GUI will not behave in this way, and instead you will have a
transparent icon representing the drive on your desktop, which you can then
double-click with the left mouse button and Raspbian will attempt to mount it.
From the Command Line Interface (CLI)
When mounting the drive from the GUI, you will have made the drive accessible
from the CLI. Typically this is located within the folder '/media'.
However, sometimes we can't use the GUI, or merely we don't want to. To mount
the drive we must first know how Linux is referring to it. Linux has the majority of
its hardware listed under the '/dev' folder structure, with connected devices
typically using the format of '/dev/sd<x>' where <x> is a letter. These can even
extend further with '/dev/sd<x><y>' where <y> is the number of the partition(s) on
the device.
There are a few commands in which we can determine what the device is of a USB
device we connect, first, connect the USB device, and then type the following:
$ sudo dmesg
V3.3
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