To this day it can still be treacherous to buy a storage adapter for your Raspberry Pi 4. There are many that will not work properly and perform very poorly.
From everything we’ve learned together in the comments and adapters I personally own/use I wanted to compile this information into a new “Best Storage Adapters for Raspberry Pi 4” list. Let’s get started!
How to choose a Pi SSD storage solution
There are a few different considerations and tradeoffs you need to weigh when you’re choosing a storage adapter/enclosure as well as the drive itself. The main considerations are:
Specific project requirements
Power
Performance
Budget
The easiest place to start is with your specific project requirements. Is this Pi going to be somewhere where you are okay with having an extra adapter/enclosure and SSD laying around? If you’re going to be using the Pi in something like a drone/vehicle then you may want to go with a USB thumbdrive style ultracompact SSD that plugs directly into a USB port and has no wires or adapters/enclosures. There are also lots of cases available specifically for the Pi that add an additional storage slot (such as M.2 SATA, the older m-SATA style, etc.) to the Pi that may work better with a tightly integrated build.
How much power is going to be available? Is your Pi going to be running off a battery where you want to use as little energy as possible? Do you have AC outlets around? Are you willing to add a powered USB hub to your setup? If your Pi is going to be sitting in a corner in the basement / a closet / some place like that then you can plan to have a powered USB hub and plentiful reliable power around. The lowest power options are going to be 2.5″ SATA drives WITHOUT an enclosure (using just an adapter instead with the drive laying in the open). I have never over years of usage used a powered USB hub with a 2.5″ SATA adapter but many enclosures won’t even boot without one.
What level of performance do you require? If your Pi is going to be running a server or hosting a database then you need a drive that has high random I/O performance as well as large throughput. Performance has a cost though both in power and budget. The highest performance NVMe drives are the most expensive and the NVMe enclosures are the most power hungry class of storage adapters and almost universally require a powered USB hub to be integrated into your setup but we’ll cover this more later in the “Power Requirements” section.
And finally what type of budget do you have? If you are looking to save money you may be wanting to reuse an old SSD or get one used for very cheap. NVMe is the most expensive and 2.5″ SATA / mSATA SSDs are the cheaper options. Places like eBay can be a great source of very cheap drives as well.
The bottom line is choose the type of solution that meets your project’s needs and your budget!
Top Performing Drives
M.2 NVME
This is the top performing (and most expensive) drive class! They require more power than other types of drives and the NVMe enclosures often bump the requirements up to potentially requiring a powered USB hub to boot (especially with an enclosure). See the “Power Requirements” section below for more information.
Samsung 980 Pro NVMe SSD
The Samsung 980 Pro (NVMe) is a professional grade SSD and one of the fastest in the world. The Samsung NVMe drives have been at the top of this category for a long time and are well trusted for both their performance and reliability / long life.
The Samsung 970 EVO Plus is a fantastic drive and has fallen in price substantially. It’s widely available around the world. The smaller capacities (such as the 250GB version) of this drive are perfect for the Pi! This is the top performance option without going into the “Pro” series of the lineup which are much more expensive.
M.2 SATA does not have the transfer rates that M.2 NVMe does but they are quite a bit cheaper and still a fantastic choice for the Pi.
Kingston A400M M.2 SATA SSD
The Kingston A400M is a cheap and reliable M.2 SATA SSD that has over 170 benchmarks on pibenchmarks.com. It’s extremely cheap and may even be cheaper than the recommended 2.5″ SATA drives in some countries!
The Western Digital Green M.2 SATA drive is the #26th most popular storage device overall on pibenchmarks.com so it definitely works well and is very affordable. This is another great budget option that can often come in at a lower cost (depending on availability, country and other market factors) than 2.5″ SATA SSDs often do while having a much lower profile!
2.5″ SATA drives are limited by the transfer speed of the SATA interface like the M.2 SATA drives. On the Raspberry Pi this is not as important as on desktop. This is usually the cheapest option and performance is still fantastic!
Kingston A400 2.5″ SATA SSD
The Kingston A400 has been a great drive to use with the Pi for years. It’s reliable, widely available around the world, has low power requirements and performs very well. It’s also very affordable. This drive has been benchmarked over 1000 times at pibenchmarks.com and is the #1 most popular SSD among the Pi community!
The Crucial BX500 is another great choice for a drive to use with the Pi. It’s the 2nd most popular SSD benchmarked with over 840 benchmarks submitted. Low power requirements and widely available!
The Western Digital Green 2.5″ SATA SSD is another option to investigate. Depending on your country and other market factors this may come in as the best deal. It’s a solid performer and commonly shows up on the storage benchmark.
Portable SSDs are ones that are designed to be used through USB and aren’t meant to be installed internally. The nice thing about these is they do not require a storage adapter. They are also extremely fast. The ones recommended here will beat 2.5″ SATA drives on the performance benchmarks since internally they are usually M.2 SSDs inside a fancy outer shell. They’re usually more expensive than internal drives but not quite as expensive as the top performing internal NVMe drives. Tends to be cleaner than a adapter/enclosure setup but not as clean as the ultracompact setup.
Samsung T5 Portable SSD
The Samsung T5 Portable is one of the most popular USB SSDs for the Raspberry Pi with over 350 unique benchmarks. It’s also one of the fastest with an average score of over 8300 points! No storage adapter required for this one, it is a USB based drive and will plug right in.
The SanDisk Extreme Portable is a very small portable SSD that can easily be put on a keychain or a loop with the built in notch. It’s also very fast with an average score of over 8,000. The drive has been tested over 147 times making it one of the more popular ones to use with the Raspberry Pi.
The cleanest possible setup option. The drive will only plug into your USB port and stay there taking up no extra footprint and adding no extra cables. These recommendations are both actually faster than 2.5″ SATA drives (internally they are M.2 NVMe drives and they perform at that level). You pay a premium for this option vs. something like a 2.5″ SATA setup but lower capacities are much more affordable.
Orico GV100 NVMe SSD
The Orico GV100 is a portable NVMe usb-stick style drive. It’s extremely fast due to actually being a true NVMe drive in a very compact form. This is an excellent choice if you are building a setup that has very limited space or having a dangling adapter/enclosure would be problematic.
The SanDisk Extreme Pro USB SSD is a true solid state drive. This is different than a typical “flash drive” which uses extremely cheap memory and has very low random I/O performance/throughput compared to a real solid state drive. I’ve used both the USB 3.1 and USB 3.2 variants with the Pi successfully and they benchmark very well!
The ICY BOX is basically a giant heatsink that you mount a high performance M.2 NVMe drive inside of. This enclosure is really fast but requires a powered USB hub. Not even the 3.5A adapter can reliably power it! The enclosure works well and will physically feel warm to the touch as it is pulling the heat off your NVMe drive!
If you really want to take things over the top the ASUS Rog Strix M.2 NVMe enclosure uses the latest USB 3.2 Gen2 specification, is RGB capable and works with the Pi! Unsurprisingly, adding the extra lighting does take extra power! A powered USB hub is also required for this enclosure. More widely available than the ICY BOX but tends to be on the expensive side.
The UGREEN M+B enclosure is a great enclosure for the Pi for M.2 SATA 2280 NGFF drives. It supports both B-key and M-key drives. Does not support newer NVMe drives. As with other types of enclosures it requires more power than other options!
The Argon ONE M.2 is a M.2 SATA Pi 4 case / storage solution. With the case and M.2 SATA expansion board you can completely enclosure your Pi 4 and have a built in M.2 slot! The M.2 SATA board is sometimes sold separately from the case itself and can be used as well. Does not support NVMe, this is for SATA M.2 drives only!
The USB 3.1 variant of the StarTech 2.5″ SATA adapter works well with the Pi 4. The USB 3.0 variant doesn’t have firmware updates available and is not recommended.
mSATA adapters are getting less common but they are still incredibly useful. Lots of old laptops that came with SSDs have this older style from before the M.2 style slot existed and took over. Often these drives are still very fast and are available for very cheap since they use an obsolete connector that no longer comes on new motherboards. The VL716 isn’t a brand but is instead the name of the chipset that lots of these adapters use. This chipset works great with the Pi!
VL716 mSATA Enclosure
The VL716 mSATA enclosure lets you connect micro SATA drives to the Pi. These drives are an older type of SSD (usually seen in laptops) predating the M.2 slot but are still widely available and perform extremely well!
Most types of adapters can be powered by the Pi itself. One notable exception is NVMe enclosures. Throughout the years we have had hundreds of comments from people who had no trouble powering 2.5″ SATA enclosures but couldn’t get a NVMe one to work at all without a powered USB hub.
Very large older 3.5″ SATA drives are known to require more power than the Pi can provide as well as some types of very high performance models that were designed to burn more power to get extra performance gains.
For solid state storage older models of solid state drives (SSDs) are also known to draw more power than their newer counterparts. If you have a drive that you think may fall into this category then definitely be on the lookout for power related issues and extra cautious about your power setup. High end “extreme” performance models also tend to draw more power (Samsung 970 NVMe drives* are some of the fastest in the world but also pretty power hungry for the Pi).
Insufficient Power Symptoms
Symptoms of a lack of power to the drive can include the system only booting sometimes (or not at all) or working for a while and then locking up. Just because the drive boots does not mean it is getting enough power. Some commenters on previous articles have described this as working fine until there was a sudden spike in CPU usage while they tried to do several things at once (high CPU, accessing storage, activating various hardware all at once) and then they would get a lockup/crash.
This is because the Pi is teetering on the edge of not having enough power and that spike caused it to drop enough where the drive actually lost power (likely only for tiny fractions of a second). This is enough instability to easily cause a crash and worse if it happened to be in the middle of writing something important! Usually nothing will happen other than you’ll have to restart the Pi but because of the risk of data loss and eventually corrupting files. That being said, if you’re particularly unlucky you will have to fsck the drive or potentially even reimage it if fsck is unable to repair the damage!
The best answer is to test for stability. Do this by stressing out the Pi and make sure you are doing activities that stress the CPU and storage at the same time like browsing the web, etc. and if you can do that for a few hours/days without a lockup/crash then you have a stable power setup!
Powered USB Hub Solution
For NVMe enclosures and power hungry drives I personally use this Sabrent powered USB hub and have been recommending it here on the blog for a long time:
Sabrent Powered USB 3.0 Hub
The Sabrent powered USB hub delivers a whopping 2.5A of dedicated power for your USB attached devices. This is almost as much as the Pi adapter itself is rated for (3.0A). It will easily power the most thirsty of setups such as NVMe enclosures.
Note: Make sure Amazon doesn’t try to take you to the non-powered version and that it’s the one with the AC adapter that plugs in to provide extra power
If this hub isn’t an option for you and you don’t have one already you can try with it then look in the reviews for people saying that it is working with Raspberry Pi. Some powered USB hubs will not play nice with the Pi so before buying one definitely check reviews and do some careful research about what to expect with the Raspberry Pi!
Oversized Power Adapter Solution
This solution will work for setups that are right on the border of having enough and not having enough power. An example would be if you can get a stable boot but are getting occasional lockups/freezes when the power dips just below the threshold it needs.
If you are using a powerful NVMe drive/enclosure combo like the ICY BOX with a high performance Samsung NVMe drive even with the extra 500 mA it will still not even boot. I have had these oversized adapters and they are great but for a very powerful drive/adapter combination you are going to need more than 500 mA.
It’s a lot less extra wires and one less AC plug though if you are right on the border and just need a little bit more. It will depend on your individual drive/adapter combo whether it’s enough or you will have to go full powered USB hub!
CanaKit 3.5A Power Adapter
The CanaKit 3.5A adapter has an extra half an amp (500 mA) of capacity to give some breathing room to your accessories. This is bigger than the official Pi power supply which provides 3.0A.
Look for a USB-C power supply rated to supply around 3.5A. 3.0A or lower won’t do much good as that is almost certainly what you already are using. You can use a higher one (at your own risk). The largest one I’ve ever used is my Dell laptop’s 30W USB-C power adapter. It’s probably not a good idea to go too much bigger than this or to even use one this big over the long term (I didn’t, just for occasional testing and as a emergency backup) but USB-C does have some specification improvements related to power management that seem to provide some flexibility here.
Power Limits
The Pi can only pass through a limited amount of extra power. On the Pi 4 this is up to 1.2A of extra power for peripherals (combined) on top of the board’s 3.0A power rating. This is much more than the Pi 2 and some other previous models could do which was only around 0.5A. This also means that getting a power adapter bigger than about 4.2A of rated current is pointless because the Pi won’t allow any more power to flow through to the board to the peripherals through USB anyway even if it’s available.
I’m oversimplifying a little bit to illustrate the point but if you want the full technical details they are available here in the Raspberry Pi USB documentation. The important takeaway is that going much above 3.5-4.0A or so will not actually provide any more power to the Pi because of these limits. If you’ve hit this ceiling and it still isn’t enough you need to go powered USB hub.
I’ve also used ones that charge cell phones to power Pis before and these ones are the most likely to fall into a range close to what the Pi uses. Most of the ones I had around the house for phones were 2.5A (just barely not enough) or 3.0A so it was enough for a backup spare but not enough to provide extra power. Nevertheless, it’s definitely worth it to check what you already have around and see if there are USB-C chargers around to test with!
Note that a powered USB hub essentially bypasses these limits because the power for your peripherals such as your USB storage will come from the AC adapter connection to the powered USB hub instead of the Pi having to provide that power.
Powered USB Hub Troubleshooting
Most hubs including the Sabrent one above can feed back power into the Pi which can cause it to not boot when the power is connected. The reason for this is that the Pi is detecting power and is trying to power on using that source but the current provided isn’t enough for the Pi to actually boot.
The solution to this is to remove the USB hub’s connection from your Pi momentarily and then connect the power. Plug your USB hub back in quickly after reconnecting the Pi’s power (if you have native USB booting set up) and unless you really fumble with reconnecting it you will have it plugged in well before it tries to boot from the SSD!
If this trick doesn’t work then unfortunately you may have a powered USB hub that is not going to work with the Pi. It’s worth checking to see if there are any firmware updates available for your USB hub before you give up on it as some readers have let me know in the comments of previous articles that they were able to get some hubs working after a firmware upgrade!
Full Storage Adapters Compatibility List
These lists are compiled from my two USB booting posts here and here.
The new USB-C 3.1 Type A version of the Sabrent adapter is reported as working in the comments by UEF. DO NOT get the USB 3.0 version as that one is below on the naughty list and won’t work!
Make absolutely sure it’s the 10Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2 version. There is another one that looks identical that is a USB 3.1 Gen 2 6Gbps that will not work. Confirmed working by RRT in the comments.
It’s bold. It’s beautiful. It’s also confirmed working by TADRACKET and Steve B. However, be warned, it takes a *lot* of power! Steve B. reports that even with the oversized 3.5A CanaKit adapter* it does not work. If you have the standard 3.0 adapter you can be practically certain it won’t power this enclosure. Does work with a powered USB hub*.
Returning legendary commentary Frank Meyer reports: Does not work with a 3.0A power adapter (also reported by TTE). It’s not enough power for this enclosure. Does work with a powered USB hub*.
M.Yusuf has given the first ever report of a working Orico adapter! Make sure it’s the USB 3.1 Gen 2 version that says “Support UASP for NVMe SSD”. This is the way.
Canakit has been making very reliable power supplies for several Pi generations now. Using a 3.5A power supply will give enough extra power for your Pi to power the drive without causing instability
Reported as working by JeffG but with an ugly messy appearance
Known Working Adapters
Known Problematic Adapters (Naughty List)
Here is a list of common USB adapters that are known to have problems with the Raspberry Pi 4. You can get some of these adapters working by using quirks mode (see the “Fix (some) USB Adapter Problems Using Quirks” section below).
Only works in the USB 2.0 ports. Will not boot in a USB 3.0 port. I have two of these and can confirm they don’t work. RIP to Sabrent, our previous king of the Pi 3 era of adapters.
Despite earlier reports as working Ryan and one other have reported this adapter does not work unless you enable quirks mode! Don’t make Ryan’s sacrifice in vain and avoid this one.
Extremely cheap adapter from AliExpress — MADATALIEXPRESS bought 5 of them and none worked, PPCM had one working, very unreliable and slow when it does work, not recommended even if you get lucky!
You can make sure everything is running correctly (and as fast as it should be) by running my quick storage benchmark. You can run the benchmark with the following one-liner:
This will give you a score you can compare to the other Raspberry Pi Storage Benchmark results and make sure that you are getting an equivalent speed to your peers with the same device.
Interesting article. I’ll add my comments. I have found the Eluteng adapter to perform reliably with SSDs that do not have high power requirements (or perhaps are more tolerant of power issues) and without the need for a powered hub. Drives that work well are Inland 120GB, 240GB and 512GB SATA SSDs. These are the only ones (of that brand) that I’ve tried. I will note that the 240GB and 512GB provide better write performance than the 120GB. All Crucial and Samsung SATA SSDs that I’ve tried ran into troubles when stressed. They would boot but when running various disk benchmarks they would eventually lock up.
Incidentally, stress testing the CPU probably doesn’t do much for validating power requirements for an external drive as it is really the USB power that can be provided that is important. I stress the drives with various benchmarks (dd, fio, bonnie++, iozone and Gnome Disks) and the troublesome ones will lock even if overall power requirements are being met.
I will try your benchmarks. Anyone who puts that much work into a shell script gets my respect!
Those are really interesting results! I’ve definitely had some nasty tangles on this site before (we tried to upgrade the firmware on one) and really seen varying results. Maybe the missing piece is that this adapter has very high power requirements! Did you have to use quirks mode with it?
Thanks for the kind words on the storage benchmark as well!
Hey, i’m currently building a k3s cluster so i tested a bunch of adapters to get the best performance for the buck.
I test all of them with a Raspberry Pi 4 4GB overclocked to 1850 Mhz and an Samsung 870 EVO 500GB
The price to perfomance winner is the INATECK, but i settled for the JSAUX, because it offers better perfomance for only a small premium.
I hope this list also helps other people looking for a good adapter.
Wow, what a great and detailed breakdown and thorough testing procedure! The StarTech sure is creeping up in price compared to the rest of that list in Europe. Today in the US it costs $18.83 but in Germany it costs 24,49€? I believe that is $28.93 US or nearly double! Maybe import tariffs and things like that are at play here.
The Inateck is a surprising winner! Not because I’ve heard anything bad about them but they are more of a budget brand so I would have assumed they would have used a really low quality storage controller like many of the other budget brands. It’s almost the cheapest one on your list.
Thanks for the great and detailed results, lots of interesting finds here!
Would you mind checking the JSAUX adapter, which firmware it has with MPtool?
Just recieved mine, and it creates all kinds of errors in dmesq/syslog.
Also it seems the FW on it, cannot be for the ASM1153, as the firmware version was 171120_D1_00_00
What is your chipset? Is it still 1153E? I feel like it can’t be with that version number either. It should tell you with:
lsusb
I’m curious which adapter it’s going to have in it. It may be a newer version of the ASMedia but if it’s working that poorly I’m really curious what it is. It honestly almost sounds like a stealth downgrade (we’ve seen this happen a few times in the past where in the middle of manufacturing without changing the model # they have changed storage adapters to a cheaper/inferior one) but the version number is much higher so I’m not sure what is completely going on yet but the chipset should help us!
People said even if this adapter came with the stock versions that start more like 14 they still need an upgrade to work properly and I didn’t see the upgrade on JSAUX’s web site. I’m guessing they are using other ASMedia firmware to upgrade it and we have had mixed results using firmware from other manufacturers for the upgrade (which makes sense, the closer the firmware upgrade happens to be to the actual one that manufacturer is using the more likely it will be to work and some are so different it works worse). Maybe I am just missing the downloads section though.
You can see a lot of additional information about the adapter in the inxi results section for example this one has this:
lass-ID: 0900
Device-1: 2-2:2 info: ASMedia Name: ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge ASM1053E SATA 6Gb/s
bridge ASM1153 SATA 3Gb/s bridge ASM1153E SATA 6Gb/s bridge
type: Mass Storage driver: uas interfaces: 1 rev: 3.1 speed: 5 Gb/s chip-ID: 174c:55aa
So this individual with that adapter is getting full UAS speeds. You can tell from the “Mass storage driver: uas”. This person is not using quirks mode which will not load the “uas” storage driver and has a performance penalty (it’s not good to have to use quirks mode, you only use it if you have to because your adapter won’t support UAS on the Pi correctly). This should enable TRIM support as well automatically in UAS mode and does indeed have a ASM1153E in there.
This might help you in your research to see some other adapters out there and what exactly is in them / what speeds and modes they are achieving successfully.
It’s going to be difficult to do 1000MB/s or 3500MB/s when the USB 3.0 bus is the bottleneck. The Pi (so far) cannot take advantage of USB 3.1 or 3.2 speeds so they mean nothing (on the Pi at least, if you’re buying it for desktop use or want to futureproof for 3.1/3.2 compatible Pis that’s a different story). USB 3.0 has a theoretical maximum of 600 MB/s and I’ve never seen anywhere near that on the Pi without getting a Compute Module 4 and going PCIe/NVMe.
Now observe the same Samsung 960 on the Compute Module 4 using NVMe: #48607. Over PCIe 1x bypassing the USB bus I’m hitting around 350MB/s on the read/write tests and that landed me in the top 10-15 benchmarks ever done even against 970s/980s over USB 3.0. Even on PCIe 1x though that is still a bottleneck and it’s not reaching anywhere near the drive’s theoretical maximums and we’d need a larger PCI slot like a 4-8x for that!
The most important factors are random read/write performance for sure for an OS drive for the Pi. You will never hit anywhere near even a budget drive’s theoretical speeds but that doesn’t mean there aren’t differences. There are huge differences in random IO performance which is what you will “feel” when using the Pi and that is what the pibenchmarks benchmark tests for. Definitely don’t be misled by the raw numbers when you’re going over something like USB 3.0!
You’re right, my mistake, I was answering so many replies at once that things got mixed up! I edited the old comment down a little bit so it wouldn’t be as confusing to anyone else following it. Thanks for the heads up!
James,
Many thanks for this write up. Made me realize how far along the Pi has come ! The steps are easy to follow. Happy user of RPi4 (4 GB) with Ubuntu Mate 20.10 with Kingston Sata SSD and USB MSATA enclosure (Adwits). The setup does not require external USB power, but might try that out. The aluminium enclosure does heat up a bit … 35 deg Celsius ambient temperature for multiple months here in India does make cooling an interesting project
No problem and thanks for the kind words! The mSATA enclosure is a great setup. I still use these drives a lot in both the USB stick factor and enclosures!
They do get super hot and that is a concern. It’s good that you have an aluminum enclosure that can basically act as a heatsink and pull that heat off the drive. I have cooked these before in the USB form factor ones that are just open air and don’t have anywhere for the heat to go but the open air. You may even want to put a thermal pad to make contact with the aluminum enclosure if it isn’t (one of those pads like comes with SSDs or motherboards sometimes would work, usually a white putty type feeling pad).
Thanks for the suggestions!
Indeed, I now have thermal pads inside and heat sink on the outside. The aluminum casing still gets hot, but lesser than before. Will have to measure over a period of time to determine its usefulness.
Best wishes,
Amar
For ICY BOX it’s highlighted that: “This enclosure is really fast but requires a powered USB hub”. Could you share a link to any USB-C to double USB-A (power, data) cable that can be used to power the enclosure?
In that paragraph I meant the Sabrent powered USB hub which has it’s own AC adapter. I have seen cables like you’re talking about before though for other types of devices but not for USB SSD/HDD enclosures. The issue is it would still be drawing on the same power source (the Pi) so you need a separate power source (the Sabrent powered USB hub) to provide power to the drive so that it isn’t drawing power from the Pi. Hopefully that helps!
Hi James,
I wanted to update my prior comments and could not find them. Anyway, I did some more testing with my RPI 4 4G with Home Assistant and tried the 32 bit OS boot with SD and SSD for everything else. This failed after 7 hours. There is an issue with the HA OS on versions above 5.4 for many people. I just saw a couple of people load Debian and Home Assistant on top instead of the HAOS and they have no issues. I believe this confirms there is a HAOS issue?
Anyway, a couple of questions:
Are messages sent out when you take the time to respond?
How would I find older comments that I left on your blog?
The messages you guys post on here as comments go up instantly if you post on the same IP and with the same name as you have used before (so the anti-spam filter recognizes you as a real person). If your IP/name you post as changed since your last post or there is a link to another web site included in there it is held for moderation (the links especially since almost every spammer posts a link to somewhere shilling something). Once you’ve had any comment approved on that IP address/name you posted as you are permanently whitelisted automatically by the filter and everything goes up instantly after that!
That is how I keep the blog from being full of spam like a lot of other sites that look like this style (a WordPress site). The Akismet anti-spam plugin does a fantastic job keeping it clean! If you have a dynamic IP it’s a little annoying but I have left it “dumb” on purpose to protect everyone’s privacy and avoid requiring logins/passwords / using tracking “cookies” / anything invasive like that.
Loading HA on Debian instead of using the full-blown HAOS sounds really promising, I’d be curious how that works for you if you give it a try!
I should have mentioned that I’m testing on a 4B, not the Pi 400.
Interesting article. I’ll add my comments. I have found the Eluteng adapter to perform reliably with SSDs that do not have high power requirements (or perhaps are more tolerant of power issues) and without the need for a powered hub. Drives that work well are Inland 120GB, 240GB and 512GB SATA SSDs. These are the only ones (of that brand) that I’ve tried. I will note that the 240GB and 512GB provide better write performance than the 120GB. All Crucial and Samsung SATA SSDs that I’ve tried ran into troubles when stressed. They would boot but when running various disk benchmarks they would eventually lock up.
Incidentally, stress testing the CPU probably doesn’t do much for validating power requirements for an external drive as it is really the USB power that can be provided that is important. I stress the drives with various benchmarks (dd, fio, bonnie++, iozone and Gnome Disks) and the troublesome ones will lock even if overall power requirements are being met.
I will try your benchmarks. Anyone who puts that much work into a shell script gets my respect!
Hey Hank,
Those are really interesting results! I’ve definitely had some nasty tangles on this site before (we tried to upgrade the firmware on one) and really seen varying results. Maybe the missing piece is that this adapter has very high power requirements! Did you have to use quirks mode with it?
Thanks for the kind words on the storage benchmark as well!
No quirks – using the UAS driver! I submitted a benchmark under the name HankB.
Excellent results, thanks Hank!
Hey, i’m currently building a k3s cluster so i tested a bunch of adapters to get the best performance for the buck.
I test all of them with a Raspberry Pi 4 4GB overclocked to 1850 Mhz and an Samsung 870 EVO 500GB
The following adapters worked really good:
JSAUX USB 3.0 to SATA Adapter Avg. 8510 Points, 11,99€, Test #1 (#50075), Test #2 (#50076)
STARTECH USB 3.1 to SATA Adapter Avg. 8462 Points, 24,49€, Test #1 #50184, Test #2 (#50185)
INATECK USB 3.0 to SATA Adapter Avg. 8310 Points, 8,74€, Test #1 (#50144), Test #2 (#50146)
UGREEN USB 3.0 to SATA Adapter Avg. 8065 Points, 11,99€, Test #1 (#50073), Test #2 (#50074)
NEEYER USB 3.0 to SATA Adapter Avg. 8000 Points, 8,99€, Test #1 (#50136), Test #2 (#50137), Test #3 (#50139), Test #4 (#50140)
The following did work, but performance could be better:
BENFEI USB 3.0 to SATA Adapter Avg. 5313 Points, 8,99€, Test #1 (#50142), Test #2 (#50143)
SABRENT USB 3.0 to SATA Adapter, EC-SSHD (Even after a firmware update it only worked with quirks mode) Avg. 5304 Points, 9,99€, Test #1 (#50014), Test #2 (#50016), Test #3 (#50021)
The following is was unable to get booting, maybe with quirks mode they could work:
ELUTENG USB 3.0 to SATA Adapter 9,99€
EASYULT USB 3.0 to SATA Adapter 8,59€
The price to perfomance winner is the INATECK, but i settled for the JSAUX, because it offers better perfomance for only a small premium.
I hope this list also helps other people looking for a good adapter.
Wow, what a great and detailed breakdown and thorough testing procedure! The StarTech sure is creeping up in price compared to the rest of that list in Europe. Today in the US it costs $18.83 but in Germany it costs 24,49€? I believe that is $28.93 US or nearly double! Maybe import tariffs and things like that are at play here.
The Inateck is a surprising winner! Not because I’ve heard anything bad about them but they are more of a budget brand so I would have assumed they would have used a really low quality storage controller like many of the other budget brands. It’s almost the cheapest one on your list.
Thanks for the great and detailed results, lots of interesting finds here!
Would you mind checking the JSAUX adapter, which firmware it has with MPtool?
Just recieved mine, and it creates all kinds of errors in dmesq/syslog.
Also it seems the FW on it, cannot be for the ASM1153, as the firmware version was 171120_D1_00_00
The firmware staring with 171120_D1 seems to be for a completely different asmedia chipset, as the firmware for ASM1153 usually starts with 14***.
Hey Hans,
I can confirm I am seeing what you’re saying. You may have already seen this on the Amazon reviews.
What is your chipset? Is it still 1153E? I feel like it can’t be with that version number either. It should tell you with:
lsusbI’m curious which adapter it’s going to have in it. It may be a newer version of the ASMedia but if it’s working that poorly I’m really curious what it is. It honestly almost sounds like a stealth downgrade (we’ve seen this happen a few times in the past where in the middle of manufacturing without changing the model # they have changed storage adapters to a cheaper/inferior one) but the version number is much higher so I’m not sure what is completely going on yet but the chipset should help us!
People said even if this adapter came with the stock versions that start more like 14 they still need an upgrade to work properly and I didn’t see the upgrade on JSAUX’s web site. I’m guessing they are using other ASMedia firmware to upgrade it and we have had mixed results using firmware from other manufacturers for the upgrade (which makes sense, the closer the firmware upgrade happens to be to the actual one that manufacturer is using the more likely it will be to work and some are so different it works worse). Maybe I am just missing the downloads section though.
One more tip I have is we can look through pibenchmarks.com for JSAUX like this. There are a ton of them. For example this guy is using a JSAUX NZUATSA here.
You can see a lot of additional information about the adapter in the inxi results section for example this one has this:
lass-ID: 0900Device-1: 2-2:2 info: ASMedia Name: ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge ASM1053E SATA 6Gb/s
bridge ASM1153 SATA 3Gb/s bridge ASM1153E SATA 6Gb/s bridge
type: Mass Storage driver: uas interfaces: 1 rev: 3.1 speed: 5 Gb/s chip-ID: 174c:55aa
So this individual with that adapter is getting full UAS speeds. You can tell from the “Mass storage driver: uas”. This person is not using quirks mode which will not load the “uas” storage driver and has a performance penalty (it’s not good to have to use quirks mode, you only use it if you have to because your adapter won’t support UAS on the Pi correctly). This should enable TRIM support as well automatically in UAS mode and does indeed have a ASM1153E in there.
This might help you in your research to see some other adapters out there and what exactly is in them / what speeds and modes they are achieving successfully.
Hopefully that helps!
It seems te Icy Box can only handle 1000 MB/s while the Samsung 970 EVO can do 3500 MB/s… so not an ideal combo?
It’s going to be difficult to do 1000MB/s or 3500MB/s when the USB 3.0 bus is the bottleneck. The Pi (so far) cannot take advantage of USB 3.1 or 3.2 speeds so they mean nothing (on the Pi at least, if you’re buying it for desktop use or want to futureproof for 3.1/3.2 compatible Pis that’s a different story). USB 3.0 has a theoretical maximum of 600 MB/s and I’ve never seen anywhere near that on the Pi without getting a Compute Module 4 and going PCIe/NVMe.
There are a bunch of benchmarks for the Icy Box + 970 on pibenchmarks.com and it’s an excellent scoring combo. Here’s mine on a 960 in March. Note the MB/s on the dd write test.
Now observe the same Samsung 960 on the Compute Module 4 using NVMe: #48607. Over PCIe 1x bypassing the USB bus I’m hitting around 350MB/s on the read/write tests and that landed me in the top 10-15 benchmarks ever done even against 970s/980s over USB 3.0. Even on PCIe 1x though that is still a bottleneck and it’s not reaching anywhere near the drive’s theoretical maximums and we’d need a larger PCI slot like a 4-8x for that!
The most important factors are random read/write performance for sure for an OS drive for the Pi. You will never hit anywhere near even a budget drive’s theoretical speeds but that doesn’t mean there aren’t differences. There are huge differences in random IO performance which is what you will “feel” when using the Pi and that is what the pibenchmarks benchmark tests for. Definitely don’t be misled by the raw numbers when you’re going over something like USB 3.0!
Thank you for your reply and enlightening me James. That makes sense;
I’m going to read your comment another 10 times and absorb all the info 🙂
(PS. fyi, i did not get an e-mail notification of your reply.)
Hey Motsel,
Thanks for the heads up about the email notification, I will check into it!
If you have any questions let me know!
Hi James, i think you mixed up / replied to the wrong comment… 🙂
Best, Motsel.
You’re right, my mistake, I was answering so many replies at once that things got mixed up! I edited the old comment down a little bit so it wouldn’t be as confusing to anyone else following it. Thanks for the heads up!
James,
Many thanks for this write up. Made me realize how far along the Pi has come ! The steps are easy to follow. Happy user of RPi4 (4 GB) with Ubuntu Mate 20.10 with Kingston Sata SSD and USB MSATA enclosure (Adwits). The setup does not require external USB power, but might try that out. The aluminium enclosure does heat up a bit … 35 deg Celsius ambient temperature for multiple months here in India does make cooling an interesting project
Hey Amar,
No problem and thanks for the kind words! The mSATA enclosure is a great setup. I still use these drives a lot in both the USB stick factor and enclosures!
They do get super hot and that is a concern. It’s good that you have an aluminum enclosure that can basically act as a heatsink and pull that heat off the drive. I have cooked these before in the USB form factor ones that are just open air and don’t have anywhere for the heat to go but the open air. You may even want to put a thermal pad to make contact with the aluminum enclosure if it isn’t (one of those pads like comes with SSDs or motherboards sometimes would work, usually a white putty type feeling pad).
Glad everything is working and best of luck!
Thanks for the suggestions!
Indeed, I now have thermal pads inside and heat sink on the outside. The aluminum casing still gets hot, but lesser than before. Will have to measure over a period of time to determine its usefulness.
Best wishes,
Amar
Excellent, that sounds like a perfect setup, best of luck and take care, let us know if you take those measurements!
For ICY BOX it’s highlighted that: “This enclosure is really fast but requires a powered USB hub”. Could you share a link to any USB-C to double USB-A (power, data) cable that can be used to power the enclosure?
Hey Max,
In that paragraph I meant the Sabrent powered USB hub which has it’s own AC adapter. I have seen cables like you’re talking about before though for other types of devices but not for USB SSD/HDD enclosures. The issue is it would still be drawing on the same power source (the Pi) so you need a separate power source (the Sabrent powered USB hub) to provide power to the drive so that it isn’t drawing power from the Pi. Hopefully that helps!
Hi James,
I wanted to update my prior comments and could not find them. Anyway, I did some more testing with my RPI 4 4G with Home Assistant and tried the 32 bit OS boot with SD and SSD for everything else. This failed after 7 hours. There is an issue with the HA OS on versions above 5.4 for many people. I just saw a couple of people load Debian and Home Assistant on top instead of the HAOS and they have no issues. I believe this confirms there is a HAOS issue?
Anyway, a couple of questions:
Are messages sent out when you take the time to respond?
How would I find older comments that I left on your blog?
Hey Bill,
Great questions! It is located here.
The messages you guys post on here as comments go up instantly if you post on the same IP and with the same name as you have used before (so the anti-spam filter recognizes you as a real person). If your IP/name you post as changed since your last post or there is a link to another web site included in there it is held for moderation (the links especially since almost every spammer posts a link to somewhere shilling something). Once you’ve had any comment approved on that IP address/name you posted as you are permanently whitelisted automatically by the filter and everything goes up instantly after that!
That is how I keep the blog from being full of spam like a lot of other sites that look like this style (a WordPress site). The Akismet anti-spam plugin does a fantastic job keeping it clean! If you have a dynamic IP it’s a little annoying but I have left it “dumb” on purpose to protect everyone’s privacy and avoid requiring logins/passwords / using tracking “cookies” / anything invasive like that.
Loading HA on Debian instead of using the full-blown HAOS sounds really promising, I’d be curious how that works for you if you give it a try!