It’s SuperPi!
July 17, 2025
Around the year 1997, the founders of Google spent their first US $100,000 check from an investor to buy 40 gigabytes of data storage hardware. They housed it in a cabinet the size of a domestic refrigerator, built of Lego bricks. It was last seen in a museum somewhere at Stanford University.
Fast-forward to today, when I installed into a Raspberry Pi a solid-state drive having a capacity of 1,000 gigabytes (one terabyte, or more than 1,000,000,000,000 letters, spaces and punctuation marks). It cost less than US $100 and was the size of an air-mail postage stamp.
But I digress. This diary is about code, not hardware, except to say that this Pi is a SuperPi: one of the new, speedy Pi 5 models with 16 gigabytes of RAM. Think of a desktop computer small enough to ride in a purse or a pants pocket.
SuperPi runs on Linux. Today’s entry tells what happened after I put the drive in, tightened all the tiny little screws, and turned everything on.
Nothing.
The device did not show up in the file system. We modern people have grown accustomed to seeing a thumb drive or an SD card magically open up as soon as we plug it in. Not this time.
Moments like these are when the fun begins for your friendly neighborhood Code Diarist. What is wrong, and how can I fix it? My very favorite activity involves learning new things to solve new problems.
It turned out that the ssd drive required configuration: a disk identifier, a partition, a file system written onto that partition, and finally an instruction telling the computer how to access files stored there.
With Linux, everything is code. The procedure involved typing things like the following:
sudo fstab /dev/nvme0n1; accepting all default settings. It creates the new partition.
sudo mkfs-ext4 /dev/nvme0n1p1; to put the ext4 file system on the new partition.
sudo lsblk; and write down the very long number it reveals, called a UUID.
sudo mkdir /mnt/ssd; to establish a so-called mount point, like an apartment where the hard drive will be found when it becomes available.
sudo vim /etc/fstab; opening up a list of instructions to which I can add the UUID, ext4, the mount point, and some other, mostly default settings. The computer uses the information to hook up with the ssd drive.
sudo shutdown -r now; to restart the computer.
sudo mkdir /mnt/ssd/diarist; to give the diarist a place to store data on the ssd. He likes seeing his own name on his storage location.
sudo chown diarist /mnt/ssd/diarist; giving the diarist permission to store and to retrieve files there.
sudo chgrp diarist /mnt/ssd/diarist;
By the way, sudo is said to stand for super doer. That is how I felt today. Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane — it’s Super Doo-err!
I would write the series of instructions into a so-called shell script, a kind of program, if I needed to re-run it many times to configure a number of these mighty machines. I did not because one time through got it done. Nevertheless, if that sequence does not spell ‘C’,‘o’,‘d’,‘e’, then I shall eat SuperPi, raspberry-colored cape and all!
Other adventures in Linux will be told in future posts.