# SSD drive - is this possible?

**URL:** <https://forums.balena.io/t/ssd-drive-is-this-possible/370249>\
**Category:** balenaEtcher\
**Created:** [April 5, 2024, 7:05am UTC](https://forums.balena.io/t/ssd-drive-is-this-possible/370249 "2024-04-05T07:05:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![PeterB](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/e8c25b/32.png) [@PeterB](https://forums.balena.io/u/PeterB)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2024, 7:05am UTC](https://forums.balena.io/t/ssd-drive-is-this-possible/370249/1 "2024-04-05T07:05:28Z")

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Hi, my existing SD card has very little space left on it, certainly not enough to store a compressed OS image.

I’m going to add a 256GB SSD drive. If I create two partitions on this new drive -

- first, larger partition for the expanded OS image
- second, smaller partition for the compressed OS image

would balenaEtcher be able to expand the image from the second partition onto the first?

(The OS is Ubuntu BTW).

Many thanks for any advice,  
Peter

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**Author:** ![chrisys](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/balena/user_avatar/forums.balena.io/chrisys/32/1731_2.png) [@chrisys](https://forums.balena.io/u/chrisys)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2024, 1:45pm UTC](https://forums.balena.io/t/ssd-drive-is-this-possible/370249/2 "2024-04-05T13:45:28Z")

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Hey Peter. No, Etcher isn’t intended for modifying partitions, it’s focussed purely on flashing image files to drives. Maybe take a look at something like gparted?

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**Author:** ![PeterB](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/e8c25b/32.png) [@PeterB](https://forums.balena.io/u/PeterB)\
**Post date:** [April 6, 2024, 7:51am UTC](https://forums.balena.io/t/ssd-drive-is-this-possible/370249/3 "2024-04-06T07:51:50Z")

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Thanks chrisys. Change of plan then - I’ve installed balenaEtcher on my Windows machine and I’ll get a USB adapter for the NVME SSD.

Should I format and partition the SSD on the machine it will eventually go in first? It’s a Linux machine so it would be ext4 rather than a Windows FAT format.

Or does flashing the image do that? The image is a Ubuntu 20.04 build.

Many thanks,  
Peter