The RPi500 comes preinstalled with a micro-SD, no surprise here. I am not a big fan of running my OS on SD-cards. So, I ordered a USB3 to SATA adapter to go with the 500. Of course my intention was to use an SSD in this setup. However, I was curious if the RPi500 could handle an spiny-disk-device. And yes, it can. Here is what I did:
Boot the RPi500 with the SD-card. Use the tool "SD Card Copier" to copy the contents of a Seagate Expansion external USB3 HDD. Surprise surprise, it worked. Once the SD-card was copied to the HDD, I shut down the RPi500 and removed the SD-card. Switching back on booted right away from the hard-drive. Of course a spiny disk does not provide a very snappy experience, but it worked. The SPi500 was able to supply the spiny disk, however, the temperature of the keyboard-computer was slightly elevated; not to an alarming level, however noticeable.
While I call the exercise a success, I went back to the original plan and replaced the HDD with a (Kingston) SSD drive. This was done by simply using the "SD Card Copier" to copy the HDD content to the SSD.
The RPi500 runs a lot cooler and snappier now, who would have though?
Contrary to the actions one had to perform with the Raspberry Pi 4 generations, not strange commands are needed to boot the RPi5 generation using USB devices.
