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.
226 thoughts on “Best Working SSD / Storage Adapters for Raspberry Pi 4 / 400”
Arthur Gribensk
Just so you know, that Sabrent powered hub does NOT work with raspberry pi 4. It backpowers into the pi keeping the pi from booting up. This is also well documented on Amazon reviews.
It’s been a minute since this came up but they pretty much all do that. Nobody has been able to link me to one that doesn’t for years. It comes up from time to time. All you do is briefly remove the USB cable from the Pi and it will power up then you immediately plug it back in.
If you want to quest for the perfect USB hub I would encourage this. It will be a very expensive quest but if you succeed it will be where others have failed over the years that investigated this from reasons ranging from core project requirements to it just triggered their OCD (I relate to this, I don’t like it either but I’ll explain why it’s the case here).
This is probably the most useful example. We went all the way down the rabbit hole on this one including down to the electrical. It’s a very complicated problem. It has to do with how manufacturers are improperly implementing USB at the hardware and even electrical level to save money. This seems to have been industry standard for years if not a decade which is why it’s almost impossible to find ones that don’t do this.
I have a hub from about 12 years ago that uses USB 2.0. It’s the Belkin one and it was extremely popular back in the day on the Raspberry Pi 1 (yes, the Raspberry Pi 1). That is the last time I saw a powered USB hub that doesn’t do this. bg seemed to have a rare old hub variant of a ADWITS USB 3.0 hub that actually didn’t backfeed power. He was not able to ever find a link to this where it can be purchased (or even referenced). Nobody ever has so far unfortunately.
Here’s another one where someone really got into it. There is hours of content here if you want to deep dive this issue. People have spent days and weeks chasing this.
It’s definitely a “rabbit hole” issue. Those are some of the bigger dives into it that I’ve done over the years. If this is something you want to pursue you absolutely can. Just know that many others have gone down this road before and all it typically results in is the information I linked above and nothing more than that so far. I’d never discourage you from trying. Maybe you will be the one that finds us the perfect USB hub that doesn’t need you to unplug it for 1 moment and plug it back in to get it to boot without the USB power backfeeding.
For me personally I’d love one that didn’t do this but it’s never been a serious problem for me to be honest. The only time you’d have to do the unplug-replug 1 second dance is if the Pi lost power unexpectedly (rebooting still works so it’s really not as serious as it sounds, it’s only cold boots that get stuck when the Pi has been completely shut off as this is an electrical issue) and I use the PiSugar so that basically can’t happen. How often does the Pi unexpectedly lose power? Hopefully not very often or the PiSugar is definitely the answer for that.
I would update my recommendation if there is one actually available out there but again nobody has ever been able to provide me with one and I have asked. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist though. We’ve had people find ones that don’t do it before but they are always very old hubs that are no longer for sale.
Basically the reason I recommend the Sabrent one is not because it’s perfect (if there is a perfect one actually still available for sale in 2022 it’s not generally known in the Pi community). It’s because all of the rest of them have the exact same flaw but they cost a lot more while the Sabrent one is cheap and I’ve personally been using it (and still am) for years. It works as well as any of them in other words and none of them produced in the last ~5 or so years have been demonstrated to do anything different.
I am really grateful for your blog posts, and have been following your blog since the day I saw your two posts about SSD boot for RPI.
Recently I saw the comment on a github thread regarding Orico M.2 NVMe enclosure, which IMHO is worth mentioning, especially because it looks like applicable to other enclosures based on RTL9210 chipset.
Great stuff, thank you for sharing! This is definitely worth noting as years ago when I started my journey of documenting a lot of these adapters there were virtually no firmware updates available to fix it from any manufacturers. This is no longer the case and companies that produce a lot of these such as Sabrent, Orico and others all have updates available for them that fix anything from TRIM to UASP support and even weirder compatibility issues with certain drives and devices (like the Pi).
I’ve heard of people even getting the transparent Orico enclosure (a infamous one among the community for not working basically) working with the firmware updates that are now available.
If you have any Orico adapters I 100% concur you should try the firmware updates for them. Like Max has said here there are significant updates available from Orico that will fix many of these enclosures or at least vastly improve them. Thanks for sharing!
I would like to add some more test results and experience.
The first 2 tests were done with a Raspberry Pi 4 B, 8GB, and the official power supply (5,1V, 3A), no HDMI and only network connected.
* Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB (MZVLB2T0HALB) (M.2 NVME) with Icy Box case IB-1816M-C31 (chip JMS583) is not working – depending on the cable length (15cm better than 30cm), sometimes it connects to the Pi, but when using it one gets IO errors. Overall not reliable nor usable )
* Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB (MZVLB2T0HALB) with Orico M.2 NVME SSD M2PV-C3 enclosure (chip RTL9210) is not working – depending on the cable length (15cm better than 30cm), sometimes it connects to the Pi, but when using it one gets IO errors. Overall not reliable nor usable). That said, it seems to be more reliable than the Icy Box one, and the Orico one has better heat management, which I would recommend over IB.
———————
The following tests were done with a Raspberry Pi 4 B, 8GB,
GeeekPi Raspberry Pi 4 PoE HAT, 12,5W,
no HDMI and only network connected.
* Samsung 850 Evo 500GB (MZMLN500), mSATA, mSata USB 3.0adapter P7Q1 (chip ASM225CM), works like a charm
* Samsung 860 Evo 500GB (MZNLH500HALU), m.2, EasyULT M.2 USB adapter NGFF SATA B/B+M Key UASP (chip ASM235CM), works like a charm
* Samsung 850 Evo 500GB, and 512GB (MZNLN512, and MZNLN500), m.2, m.2, EasyULT M.2 USB adapter NGFF SATA B/B+M Key UASP (chip ASM235CM), works like a charm
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Power consumption
The mSATA USB adapter draws 1W more power (over the EasyULT one), and gets hotter, due to its inefficient linear voltage regulator.
I measured the power consumption and read 4W (idle) with the EasyULT sticks and 5W (idle) for the nameless mSATA adapter.
Both figures represent Pi + SSD adapter together when just idling.
Thanks for posting your results! Those are great mSATA results especially.
I think I can help. I can personally vouch that the ICY Box one works for sure (I also have the JMS583 version) and am using it here in my Raspberry Pi 400 Overclocking and Setup Guide:
It’s also a known working brand on my storage site Pi Benchmarks:
I think I can explain the problem. It’s the 2TB module size. I’ve documented before that when I use my 250 GB Samsung EVO I can always get away with using a 3.0A to 3.5A power adapter (like the CanaKit). If I use a 1TB module or higher I almost never can. Especially with Samsung drives the 1TB or higher module sizes use significantly higher power (and give significantly and measurably higher performance to the point where they actually print the difference on the box).
Notice in the above picture that there’s one caveat to me saying the ICY Box works. It’s kind of a pig when it comes to power. You’ll notice I have it attached to my Sabrent 4 port powered USB hub for this reason. It works 100% but that enclosure especially (and some other notable ones like the ROG Strix RGB enclosure) almost universally require a powered USB hub. Especially with that 2TB module though I really think you will need a powered USB hub for a reliable and full-performance setup.
The mSATA and 2.5″ SSD power requirements are much lower and you have to be using an unusual drive or something like a really big 3.5″ 10K RPM HDD to have to power those with a hub. It’s always NVMe that is the problem.
If you happen to have access to some smaller modules (<1 TB) I bet if you tested them they would probably both work would be my guess. The RTL9210 is another pretty common chipset that we have a bunch of benchmarks on pibenchmarks.com. I'm actually not sure about the Orico M2PV-C3 specifically but the chipset is at least well known and shouldn't be a problem in and of itself.
My guess from your comprehensive testing is that you're bumping up against power here. It's an extremely tight budget of 1.2A that can be passed through to *all* connected USB accessories to the Pi. This is why connecting a power adapter bigger than around 3.5A or so won't help because the Pi literally has voltage regulation circuitry to not allow more power than 1.2A to flow to all USB accessories. We've actually seen cases where if people plugged in a USB keyboard that would pull enough power away from their SSD that it would start to freeze/crash or perform very slowly.
I can personally vouch for the ICY Box at least here as 100% reliable but only on reliable and dedicated power otherwise it's a pig. The Orico I suspect will work as well. I searched pibenchmarks.com for M2PV-C3 to see if people had submitted any and there are 9 results where people typed in the comment that they used that exact model and had pretty good scoring submissions for what it’s worth.
Due to these factors I would definitely recommend trying a cheap powered USB hub with them as an experiment. I think those are probably both solid adapters but they probably (especially with a 2TB module) need some more available dedicated power to work reliably. Hopefully that helps!
I have been using the 500GB Samsung T5 and T7 external SSD drives and have had no problem with them on three of my RPI-4s. There is ‘only’ one drive attached to each RPI4, so power hasn’t been a problem. Never even a hiccup. Note that one of the RPIs in on 24×7 as it runs Pi-hole and is the redis server for the home network. Also it runs simh for a PDP 11/70 simulation with the front panel from ‘Obsolescence Guaranteed’ and a few other services too. Hasn’t missed a beat. Only goes down when I have to reboot for updates. Plugged into a UPS.
I also use the Startech cables (usb to internal 2.5″ SSD drives). Work great. I’ve had a stack of older lower capacity SSDs in my cabinet that I was wondering what to use them for … Well just use them as fast boot drives for RPI4s!
Where the problems came in was trying to use an additional external HDD for a NAS solution. I had a WD 4TB HDD one laying around and that experiment failed. PI4 would not boot reliably and other intermittent problems while using. My solution there was to buy an externally powered 4TB WD Book and that worked. However now I had two power cords to deal with… So gave up on that too.
The latest adventure was working with a Geek Tower kit. The Samsung T5 was to big to fit within the little Tower case, so did some research and bought a 500GB USB Sabrent Rocket Nano which would fit width wise but was slightly long (okay because easy to cut a little bigger access hole in the back of case). But this device got hot just sitting there. The first clue…. Second it would boot fine. But if I left the room and came back, I’d find the OS unable to find any files on it and giving a read/write error. One night I worked two three hours programming on it and it ran fine. But if I’d leave for ‘x’ time, same problem. Like it tried to go to sleep or something 🙂 . So can’t recommend the Rocket Nano. Ended up building a small Lego base for the tower to sit on and to hide a Samsung T5+Cable. Worked fine ever since.
My experience has been largely the same as yours. I’m usually able to get away without having a powered USB hub or some sort of additional power source on SATA. The exception is connecting something that takes significantly more power than a 2.5″ SSD such as a large HDD. These work just fine on the Pi but because when the drives spin up there is a big power spike it’s hard to get away with it without using an additional power source.
The Sabrent one I take it was not power related (much more common with NVMe). The 500GB I wouldn’t necessarily expect to have trouble (I usually only have trouble with NVMe drives of 1TB or higher). I was just curious if you had tried this on a powered USB hub as the power issues are much more common with NVMe and that issue definitely sounds a bit like it.
Concerning Sabrent Nano. No I did not try with powered USB hub. However after I wrote above I got curious and hooked up both the Nano and a T7 to one of my workstations for fun. Put a volt& monitor between PC and SSD. The curious thing is the Nano is constantly pulling 100 to 200 milli amps while the T7 shows 0 milli-amps. When I copy a large file (so I can watch), the T7 will jump up to 100-300 milli amps, but eventually fall back to 0. Not the Nano. It never goes below ~100 milliamps. So something there is always ‘active’ in the Nano which is why it heats up I suppose.
Those are definitely interesting results! The Samsung T3/T5/T7 drives have always been fantastic and get along great with the Pi. It sounds like you’re even getting substantial power savings! The T7 is actually a NVMe drive internally but it has a very fancy USB and power controller. It’s honestly one of the highest scoring drives on Pi Benchmarks and has been for almost as long as I’ve had the site.
The NVMe drives definitely can bring the heat. Most of my motherboards / adapters / enclosures all come with some sort of thermal spreader material (usually a malleable little strip that covers the top). It’s honestly not that fantastic at cooling (it’s more like a heat spreader) but it does get that heat off the NVMe module a lot better than it just being exposed to the air (unless you have some sort of direct cooling blowing on it). I’ve definitely at least caused significant discoloration to modules running them open air in high performance settings and have felt them so hot they will burn you before.
You’ll also see some parts of the label on the drive start to look darker or like they’re “sweating” a little bit on certain “hotspots” (definitely not good). It may be worth putting something on it like this to pull the heat off / spread it out more easily as at the very least it prevents hotspots like that from forming. It works best with a thin piece of metal on top of the thermal material and most enclosures/motherboards I’ve worked with will have it touching some kind of metal plate like this.
An example of this is the hilarious RGB (yes, RGB) Rog Strix enclosure. You can see in the Amazon pictures how the thermal material makes contact with a metal plate and basically uses the whole enclosure’s outside as a thermal conductor to pull heat off the module and store it in the enclosure case for air to slowly pull off it. Despite the ridiculousness of putting user-controllable RGB in a NVMe enclosure this is actually a great thermal design. The entire aluminum enclosure becomes basically a very large surface area (relative to the NVMe module) heatsink. I have one and even though the pictures don’t show it (it just shows red squares that say thermal pad where they go) it comes with the malleable heat strips you put in contact with the drive and the enclosure’s contact/heat plate. The outer enclosure can get warm to the touch (never as hot as the module by itself though because of the surface area) so it’s definitely doing it’s job.
Your numbers seem about right. Check out this chart (has a deep dive on SSD power usage across different technologies like 2.5″ SATA, M.2 SATA, M.2 NVMe, etc).
You will notice right off the bat that NVMe is quite high even idle. PCIe is even worse (way worse). In fact, the upper range of those numbers are a big problem for the Pi. 5-15W is a HUGE range on an embedded device. That is literally more power for the upper range than the entire Pi and all accessories combined are even capable of using. That’s why the bigger boys in PCIe or NVMe almost always require a powered USB hub or some sort of powered enclosure. My experience has been the smaller capacities like 250, 512 tend to use the lower range and that the bigger modules like 1TB or higher tend to use the upper range but there are ultra-power-efficient NVMe drives out there if you shop for them that can break this mold.
The reason this is the case is that the Raspberry Pi power adapter is 3.0A at 5V. If we plug those numbers into a handy amp to watt converter we get a total maximum output of 15W. That is to power both the Pi, all accessories, AND the drive which on NVMe can be anything (during a sequential write) from 3 watts (not a problem) to 10 watts (that’s going to be a BIG problem as 2/3rd of the power adapter’s output is already spoken for just for the drive). Basically we’re working with really tight ranges here and you can see why NVMe tends to run afoul but SATA (unless it’s a large HDD) it’s honestly quite hard to hit it as only 1st/2nd gen 2.5″ SSDs (known to be much less power efficient, it was older tech) could possibly consume anywhere near the upper end on that chart. M.2 SATA is also quite hard to hit the limit and those are much more power efficient than NVMe (but capable of much less in the performance category vs. NVMe).
It sounds like you have a great setup going! I wonder if the Rocket might work on a powered hub but it really depends on what your goals on as to whether or not it’s worth it. Thanks for sharing your build!
Thanks for the info. BTW, Watts = Amps * Volts (converter is your brain. ha 😉 ) .
I’ve already formatted it FAT32 and will use the Nano as a regular ‘thumb drive’ now. So probably won’t test as a boot drive for an RPI4 with a powered hub. At least for awhile. The powered hub would ruin the systems compactness concept anyway. The Nano is very well built I must say. Feels heavy/solid in the hand and has a metal case. It just has that one problem that makes it unusable for what I intended it for.
My goal for the little Geek Mini Tower is to have a RPI4 running PI OS 64bit for ARM 64bit development always available on the network. With the RPI4 PDP 11/70 Pi-Hole machine, I have it running the PI OS 32bit, so can test apps over there too on both architechures. Anyway, just to have ‘tools’ available when needed. Other PIs I have are used/will be used for home automation projects, robotics, and such — normal RPI activities !!!
I figured by how handy you were with a multi-meter and the way you spoke about the electrical side that you might have that reaction / response to that! I confess, I have more of a software background than an electrical engineering type of background. I was a L3 hardware tech (desktop/laptop/tablet/pc/phone/printers/other IT equipment) for the government up until January of 2021 when I went full time working on my web site but my specialty was scripting / automation! I’ve been developing since I was about 14 with a lot of stuff published on GitHub (so it’s fair to call me more of a developer or something like a hybrid?): TheRemote – GitHub.
I think it’s safe to say you’d school me on a lot of electrical issues as I know / learn at least enough to understand what I’m working with (kind of similar to how I learned programming) but I don’t have an electrical engineering type of degree or anything like that (believe it or not my degree is in Psychology and I had an 8 year social work career before switching to IT for work). It wasn’t just a cold turkey switch of course, I had already been coding / publishing on GitHub for years and had always been into computing. My very first programming projects were basically multiplayer games I was running as a teenager (all open sourced on GitHub now).
I’m definitely diving into the electrical side a lot more these days as embedded device work has brought me way more into that world than I ever was strictly with regular PCs/laptops/tablets/etc. Most of this knowledge I have about the storage specifically is from my experience from years on the site talking with everyone from around the world trying to troubleshoot weird issues with these as well as running https://pibenchmarks.com which required me to dive into a lot of these areas outside of my background out of necessity. I definitely do need to start just remembering some of these formulas though (it will come in handy).
I think the setup sounds excellent! I run the 64 bit flavor mostly now as well. They’re such great devices to have for testing like this. Now you have both a 32 and 64 bit environment! I like it so much better than messing with virtual machines or anything like that. It honestly even lets me dodge having to set up complicated and annoying cross-building chains in some cases. The power and space requirements also can’t be beat.
Thanks for the great conversation and letting me know what you were doing with it! I’m always stunned by the awesome ideas / uses people have for Pis and it’s one of the funnest things about them. Cheers and take care!
My background started with Applied Computer Science BS Degree (only one class short of a math degree too, but was time to leave formal education behind) back in ’86. So had all the math, physics and electronics, and labs that went with it. Got me a job writing real-time programming (C and Assembly for Z80/68XXX/x86 and later even PowerPc) for control systems (RTUs VME systems, and master software) and on the PC desktop side using Borland Turbo Pascal, later Delphi, Borland C/C++ (GUIs/Editors/databases) to support them. Of course cross compiling for the control systems. So very diverse environment which is what I liked about that job. We automated substations hydro plants, and communications systems and such with our own hardware and software. Was very enjoyable work. Even got me out in the field sometimes around the country. We also maintained our own networking and servers (Linux based by then instead of Windows) too. Wore a lot of hats in those days. Now working on the other end of those systems as an EMS (Energy Management System) Analyst for a utility which gathers information from all those sites which keeps the lights on in peoples homes…. Most of my work deals with maintaining the systems (written in C/C++/Fortran) and writing a lot of ‘glue’ code in Python 3 as it works really well in this situation. But it is all higher level stuff….And in the MS Windows world. I prefer Linux though as my OS of choice. Started dabbling with Slackware on floppies, and then Red Hat. Even got our company to put in a Linux Server finally with Red Hat 5 I believe. Saved a lot of money in those days on maintenance (system just ran and ran and ran) … and in user license fees.
But at home I like to dabble with nuts/bolts hardware/software to keep me nearer the hardware side of things as a hobby…. Windows free at home on desktops/laptops/servers. All systems run a flavor of Linux. Hardware wise, we have a lot of great platforms to play with now compared to 80s and 90s… RPIs, Beagle Bones for general purpose and special purpose boards like newer RP2040 based boards, Arduino, Teensy, etc…. Plus the many sensors and such ready built… And it is all relatively affordable too. Good time to be alive. Of course I think every generation says that!!
Enjoyed the conversation too. Maybe we’ll talk again some time 🙂 .
Oh wow, you’re one of the rare ones! You graduated from college the year I was born. I feel like my generation is like 70% of the IT workforce although they aren’t nearly as passionate about it in general I think as you or I are. Maybe this is how it felt for your generation as well and you had a drive above what others in the field around you had (I’d be curious if it felt this way to you).
I’ve absolutely fallen in love with Linux and finally ditched my Windows desktop this year. I left it installed as a dual boot option in case I want to play a game that only works on Windows but honestly I find myself just playing titles that have Linux support within Steam and haven’t even booted it since. I did Ubuntu 20.10 for it but I’m not married to the Ubuntu distro and I’m sure I could find something else that suited my needs better.
I learned everything I know from people like you and you are always the type of IT person I would look up to and want to know as much as you guys. It’s literally a lifetime journey to get there. There’s so much to know. I keep breaking through barriers I never knew how to before (I have some upcoming security research with official registered CVEs / vulnerabilities coming up for a few different cryptocurrency ASIC miners with an embedded device / SBC on board controlling it that are currently in vendor disclosure stage). It’s a bittersweet feeling because you think it’s going to feel like you’ve finally “made it” or “mastered it”.
It turns out it doesn’t feel like that at all. The main thing I’ve learned is how much I still don’t know. Even with the ability to breach and control these devices (which I thought as a card carrying “hacker” maybe I would start to feel like I’ve mastered IT) it almost feels like I know less now that I understand what is possible / what it takes. You break through into these fields where you can understand and even participate and you realize there’s another LIFETIME of knowledge just within that field! There’s no such thing as mastering all of it (or at least I’ve never known or heard of anyone that ever has).
It’s a very valuable lesson though as once you understand that nobody could know everything about every single field in IT (that is impossible in one lifetime) it helps you realize that everyone has their specializations / areas of expertise and it’s okay for those to be different. You can specialize and eventually become an expert on the things you are passionate about. These can and will change over time as the technology evolves (and the people who won’t change with it risk becoming obsolete although in some cases it works out for them like Fortran developers). Everyone has different things to bring to the table for sure!
I’m glad we have you with us in the field and among the Raspberry Pi / Arduino / Teensy / embedded device / SBC world! I’ve collected quite a few of these as well. I also have the Teensy, the Udoo x86 (wanted to try a x86_64 SBC), a Tinkerboard, a couple of Arduinos and I’m sure I’m forgetting some others here and there. I definitely think things are going to continue to move more in this direction toward very small and very power efficient embedded devices (or even a series of embedded devices working together). This has been a great bet since I started the site 5-6 years ago and it’s still my most popular content for sure.
You’re definitely welcome any time and feel free any time to stop by and chime in with some of your knowledge you’ve gained over your career! I’m always willing to learn new things / be challenged as this is my secret / how I grow and learn new things. I hope we talk again sometime as well!
Green_Dragon527
hey James a bit off-topic, since this isn’t a Pi4 question, but since you said RIP to Sabrent, did the Sabrent adapter work well with a 3B(non-plus)? Was also wondering if it had TRIM support if connected
No problem at all! So the adapter I was referring to in that was the Sabrent SSHD. There are firmware updates that can get that one working even on the Pi 4.
Their results were that after the firmware update they initially thought they could take it out or quirks mode but I think they had to end up keeping it in quirks mode. You may not have to use quirks mode on the Pi 3 since it boots from USB using a totally different mechanism. I’m not sure if you will have to enable quirks mode manually or not (I think you still may since it’s not using UASP in quirks mode) but it may just work honestly.
It has been years since I tried it on the Pi 3 with the SSHD but originally that was the adapter I had for it back in the day. I would say definitely do the firmware updates for sure and give it a try if you have that adapter already!
I must be missing something!Test recognised both the SD and the portable Samsung T7 but run tests for the SD only. Couldn’t see any “errors” in the output! Is there a trick to it 🙂
That means that the SD card is your current boot device (the root device basically). The test only checks your boot device so this would mean it’s not actually running off the SSD. Have you tried booting with the SD card taken out?
If you just plugged it in to test it that would be normal (I do want to add an option to select which drive to test). If it’s selecting the SD card then you aren’t actually booted into the SSD right now. It’s booting off the SD card still. You may want to try booting with the SD card out (unless you’re not trying to boot and are just trying to test).
I do plan on adding an option to select the drive to test here as that has been requested a few times.
Doesn’t USB 3.0 only provide a maximum of 900mA per port, meaning that as long as you only have one drive plugged in via USB, power draw should always be below the Pi’s 1.2A limit? Or am I missing something here? I know there’s USB PD and similar technologies, but does the Pi even use those?
The answer is there is a long forgotten standard from before USB PD (the Pi doesn’t support this yet, I do expect the next one will and will support USB-PD as it’s part of USB 3.1). This is called USB-BCS 1.2 or “USB Battery Charge Specification”. This mode was meant to provide a little bit of extra power to charge batteries and this is how it is doing it. The other key detail is that it is using a type of USB port called a “Charging Downstream Port” to be able to do this which can provide up to 1.5A.
It’s a great question though and I had to deep dive it in the past. Hopefully that helps!
Just so you know, that Sabrent powered hub does NOT work with raspberry pi 4. It backpowers into the pi keeping the pi from booting up. This is also well documented on Amazon reviews.
Hey Arthur,
It’s been a minute since this came up but they pretty much all do that. Nobody has been able to link me to one that doesn’t for years. It comes up from time to time. All you do is briefly remove the USB cable from the Pi and it will power up then you immediately plug it back in.
If you want to quest for the perfect USB hub I would encourage this. It will be a very expensive quest but if you succeed it will be where others have failed over the years that investigated this from reasons ranging from core project requirements to it just triggered their OCD (I relate to this, I don’t like it either but I’ll explain why it’s the case here).
This is probably the most useful example. We went all the way down the rabbit hole on this one including down to the electrical. It’s a very complicated problem. It has to do with how manufacturers are improperly implementing USB at the hardware and even electrical level to save money. This seems to have been industry standard for years if not a decade which is why it’s almost impossible to find ones that don’t do this.
I have a hub from about 12 years ago that uses USB 2.0. It’s the Belkin one and it was extremely popular back in the day on the Raspberry Pi 1 (yes, the Raspberry Pi 1). That is the last time I saw a powered USB hub that doesn’t do this. bg seemed to have a rare old hub variant of a ADWITS USB 3.0 hub that actually didn’t backfeed power. He was not able to ever find a link to this where it can be purchased (or even referenced). Nobody ever has so far unfortunately.
Here’s another one where someone really got into it. There is hours of content here if you want to deep dive this issue. People have spent days and weeks chasing this.
It’s definitely a “rabbit hole” issue. Those are some of the bigger dives into it that I’ve done over the years. If this is something you want to pursue you absolutely can. Just know that many others have gone down this road before and all it typically results in is the information I linked above and nothing more than that so far. I’d never discourage you from trying. Maybe you will be the one that finds us the perfect USB hub that doesn’t need you to unplug it for 1 moment and plug it back in to get it to boot without the USB power backfeeding.
For me personally I’d love one that didn’t do this but it’s never been a serious problem for me to be honest. The only time you’d have to do the unplug-replug 1 second dance is if the Pi lost power unexpectedly (rebooting still works so it’s really not as serious as it sounds, it’s only cold boots that get stuck when the Pi has been completely shut off as this is an electrical issue) and I use the PiSugar so that basically can’t happen. How often does the Pi unexpectedly lose power? Hopefully not very often or the PiSugar is definitely the answer for that.
I would update my recommendation if there is one actually available out there but again nobody has ever been able to provide me with one and I have asked. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist though. We’ve had people find ones that don’t do it before but they are always very old hubs that are no longer for sale.
Basically the reason I recommend the Sabrent one is not because it’s perfect (if there is a perfect one actually still available for sale in 2022 it’s not generally known in the Pi community). It’s because all of the rest of them have the exact same flaw but they cost a lot more while the Sabrent one is cheap and I’ve personally been using it (and still am) for years. It works as well as any of them in other words and none of them produced in the last ~5 or so years have been demonstrated to do anything different.
Hopefully that helps!
James,
I am really grateful for your blog posts, and have been following your blog since the day I saw your two posts about SSD boot for RPI.
Recently I saw the comment on a github thread regarding Orico M.2 NVMe enclosure, which IMHO is worth mentioning, especially because it looks like applicable to other enclosures based on RTL9210 chipset.
GitHub Comment Link
You can head over to Orico’s China website for firmware that doesn’t sleep after 10 minutes.
Change configuration:
Lite_0 means never sleep
Lite_10 means sleep after 10 minutes
Hey Max,
Great stuff, thank you for sharing! This is definitely worth noting as years ago when I started my journey of documenting a lot of these adapters there were virtually no firmware updates available to fix it from any manufacturers. This is no longer the case and companies that produce a lot of these such as Sabrent, Orico and others all have updates available for them that fix anything from TRIM to UASP support and even weirder compatibility issues with certain drives and devices (like the Pi).
I’ve heard of people even getting the transparent Orico enclosure (a infamous one among the community for not working basically) working with the firmware updates that are now available.
If you have any Orico adapters I 100% concur you should try the firmware updates for them. Like Max has said here there are significant updates available from Orico that will fix many of these enclosures or at least vastly improve them. Thanks for sharing!
I would like to add some more test results and experience.
The first 2 tests were done with a Raspberry Pi 4 B, 8GB, and the official power supply (5,1V, 3A), no HDMI and only network connected.
* Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB (MZVLB2T0HALB) (M.2 NVME) with Icy Box case IB-1816M-C31 (chip JMS583) is not working – depending on the cable length (15cm better than 30cm), sometimes it connects to the Pi, but when using it one gets IO errors. Overall not reliable nor usable )
* Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB (MZVLB2T0HALB) with Orico M.2 NVME SSD M2PV-C3 enclosure (chip RTL9210) is not working – depending on the cable length (15cm better than 30cm), sometimes it connects to the Pi, but when using it one gets IO errors. Overall not reliable nor usable). That said, it seems to be more reliable than the Icy Box one, and the Orico one has better heat management, which I would recommend over IB.
———————
The following tests were done with a Raspberry Pi 4 B, 8GB,
GeeekPi Raspberry Pi 4 PoE HAT, 12,5W,
no HDMI and only network connected.
* Samsung 850 Evo 500GB (MZMLN500), mSATA, mSata USB 3.0adapter P7Q1 (chip ASM225CM), works like a charm
* Samsung 860 Evo 500GB (MZNLH500HALU), m.2, EasyULT M.2 USB adapter NGFF SATA B/B+M Key UASP (chip ASM235CM), works like a charm
* Samsung 850 Evo 500GB, and 512GB (MZNLN512, and MZNLN500), m.2, m.2, EasyULT M.2 USB adapter NGFF SATA B/B+M Key UASP (chip ASM235CM), works like a charm
———————-
Power consumption
The mSATA USB adapter draws 1W more power (over the EasyULT one), and gets hotter, due to its inefficient linear voltage regulator.
I measured the power consumption and read 4W (idle) with the EasyULT sticks and 5W (idle) for the nameless mSATA adapter.
Both figures represent Pi + SSD adapter together when just idling.
Hey Martin,
Thanks for posting your results! Those are great mSATA results especially.
I think I can help. I can personally vouch that the ICY Box one works for sure (I also have the JMS583 version) and am using it here in my Raspberry Pi 400 Overclocking and Setup Guide:
It’s also a known working brand on my storage site Pi Benchmarks:
Pi Benchmarks – ICY Box Enclosure
I think I can explain the problem. It’s the 2TB module size. I’ve documented before that when I use my 250 GB Samsung EVO I can always get away with using a 3.0A to 3.5A power adapter (like the CanaKit). If I use a 1TB module or higher I almost never can. Especially with Samsung drives the 1TB or higher module sizes use significantly higher power (and give significantly and measurably higher performance to the point where they actually print the difference on the box).
Notice in the above picture that there’s one caveat to me saying the ICY Box works. It’s kind of a pig when it comes to power. You’ll notice I have it attached to my Sabrent 4 port powered USB hub for this reason. It works 100% but that enclosure especially (and some other notable ones like the ROG Strix RGB enclosure) almost universally require a powered USB hub. Especially with that 2TB module though I really think you will need a powered USB hub for a reliable and full-performance setup.
The mSATA and 2.5″ SSD power requirements are much lower and you have to be using an unusual drive or something like a really big 3.5″ 10K RPM HDD to have to power those with a hub. It’s always NVMe that is the problem.
If you happen to have access to some smaller modules (<1 TB) I bet if you tested them they would probably both work would be my guess. The RTL9210 is another pretty common chipset that we have a bunch of benchmarks on pibenchmarks.com. I'm actually not sure about the Orico M2PV-C3 specifically but the chipset is at least well known and shouldn't be a problem in and of itself.
My guess from your comprehensive testing is that you're bumping up against power here. It's an extremely tight budget of 1.2A that can be passed through to *all* connected USB accessories to the Pi. This is why connecting a power adapter bigger than around 3.5A or so won't help because the Pi literally has voltage regulation circuitry to not allow more power than 1.2A to flow to all USB accessories. We've actually seen cases where if people plugged in a USB keyboard that would pull enough power away from their SSD that it would start to freeze/crash or perform very slowly.
I can personally vouch for the ICY Box at least here as 100% reliable but only on reliable and dedicated power otherwise it's a pig. The Orico I suspect will work as well. I searched pibenchmarks.com for M2PV-C3 to see if people had submitted any and there are 9 results where people typed in the comment that they used that exact model and had pretty good scoring submissions for what it’s worth.
Due to these factors I would definitely recommend trying a cheap powered USB hub with them as an experiment. I think those are probably both solid adapters but they probably (especially with a 2TB module) need some more available dedicated power to work reliably. Hopefully that helps!
No question, but just my experiences so far.
I have been using the 500GB Samsung T5 and T7 external SSD drives and have had no problem with them on three of my RPI-4s. There is ‘only’ one drive attached to each RPI4, so power hasn’t been a problem. Never even a hiccup. Note that one of the RPIs in on 24×7 as it runs Pi-hole and is the redis server for the home network. Also it runs simh for a PDP 11/70 simulation with the front panel from ‘Obsolescence Guaranteed’ and a few other services too. Hasn’t missed a beat. Only goes down when I have to reboot for updates. Plugged into a UPS.
I also use the Startech cables (usb to internal 2.5″ SSD drives). Work great. I’ve had a stack of older lower capacity SSDs in my cabinet that I was wondering what to use them for … Well just use them as fast boot drives for RPI4s!
Where the problems came in was trying to use an additional external HDD for a NAS solution. I had a WD 4TB HDD one laying around and that experiment failed. PI4 would not boot reliably and other intermittent problems while using. My solution there was to buy an externally powered 4TB WD Book and that worked. However now I had two power cords to deal with… So gave up on that too.
The latest adventure was working with a Geek Tower kit. The Samsung T5 was to big to fit within the little Tower case, so did some research and bought a 500GB USB Sabrent Rocket Nano which would fit width wise but was slightly long (okay because easy to cut a little bigger access hole in the back of case). But this device got hot just sitting there. The first clue…. Second it would boot fine. But if I left the room and came back, I’d find the OS unable to find any files on it and giving a read/write error. One night I worked two three hours programming on it and it ran fine. But if I’d leave for ‘x’ time, same problem. Like it tried to go to sleep or something 🙂 . So can’t recommend the Rocket Nano. Ended up building a small Lego base for the tower to sit on and to hide a Samsung T5+Cable. Worked fine ever since.
Happy RPI computing! I enjoy it.
Hey rclark,
My experience has been largely the same as yours. I’m usually able to get away without having a powered USB hub or some sort of additional power source on SATA. The exception is connecting something that takes significantly more power than a 2.5″ SSD such as a large HDD. These work just fine on the Pi but because when the drives spin up there is a big power spike it’s hard to get away with it without using an additional power source.
The Sabrent one I take it was not power related (much more common with NVMe). The 500GB I wouldn’t necessarily expect to have trouble (I usually only have trouble with NVMe drives of 1TB or higher). I was just curious if you had tried this on a powered USB hub as the power issues are much more common with NVMe and that issue definitely sounds a bit like it.
Thanks for leaving your experience and cheers!
Concerning Sabrent Nano. No I did not try with powered USB hub. However after I wrote above I got curious and hooked up both the Nano and a T7 to one of my workstations for fun. Put a volt& monitor between PC and SSD. The curious thing is the Nano is constantly pulling 100 to 200 milli amps while the T7 shows 0 milli-amps. When I copy a large file (so I can watch), the T7 will jump up to 100-300 milli amps, but eventually fall back to 0. Not the Nano. It never goes below ~100 milliamps. So something there is always ‘active’ in the Nano which is why it heats up I suppose.
Hey rclark,
Those are definitely interesting results! The Samsung T3/T5/T7 drives have always been fantastic and get along great with the Pi. It sounds like you’re even getting substantial power savings! The T7 is actually a NVMe drive internally but it has a very fancy USB and power controller. It’s honestly one of the highest scoring drives on Pi Benchmarks and has been for almost as long as I’ve had the site.
The NVMe drives definitely can bring the heat. Most of my motherboards / adapters / enclosures all come with some sort of thermal spreader material (usually a malleable little strip that covers the top). It’s honestly not that fantastic at cooling (it’s more like a heat spreader) but it does get that heat off the NVMe module a lot better than it just being exposed to the air (unless you have some sort of direct cooling blowing on it). I’ve definitely at least caused significant discoloration to modules running them open air in high performance settings and have felt them so hot they will burn you before.
You’ll also see some parts of the label on the drive start to look darker or like they’re “sweating” a little bit on certain “hotspots” (definitely not good). It may be worth putting something on it like this to pull the heat off / spread it out more easily as at the very least it prevents hotspots like that from forming. It works best with a thin piece of metal on top of the thermal material and most enclosures/motherboards I’ve worked with will have it touching some kind of metal plate like this.
An example of this is the hilarious RGB (yes, RGB) Rog Strix enclosure. You can see in the Amazon pictures how the thermal material makes contact with a metal plate and basically uses the whole enclosure’s outside as a thermal conductor to pull heat off the module and store it in the enclosure case for air to slowly pull off it. Despite the ridiculousness of putting user-controllable RGB in a NVMe enclosure this is actually a great thermal design. The entire aluminum enclosure becomes basically a very large surface area (relative to the NVMe module) heatsink. I have one and even though the pictures don’t show it (it just shows red squares that say thermal pad where they go) it comes with the malleable heat strips you put in contact with the drive and the enclosure’s contact/heat plate. The outer enclosure can get warm to the touch (never as hot as the module by itself though because of the surface area) so it’s definitely doing it’s job.
Your numbers seem about right. Check out this chart (has a deep dive on SSD power usage across different technologies like 2.5″ SATA, M.2 SATA, M.2 NVMe, etc).
You will notice right off the bat that NVMe is quite high even idle. PCIe is even worse (way worse). In fact, the upper range of those numbers are a big problem for the Pi. 5-15W is a HUGE range on an embedded device. That is literally more power for the upper range than the entire Pi and all accessories combined are even capable of using. That’s why the bigger boys in PCIe or NVMe almost always require a powered USB hub or some sort of powered enclosure. My experience has been the smaller capacities like 250, 512 tend to use the lower range and that the bigger modules like 1TB or higher tend to use the upper range but there are ultra-power-efficient NVMe drives out there if you shop for them that can break this mold.
The reason this is the case is that the Raspberry Pi power adapter is 3.0A at 5V. If we plug those numbers into a handy amp to watt converter we get a total maximum output of 15W. That is to power both the Pi, all accessories, AND the drive which on NVMe can be anything (during a sequential write) from 3 watts (not a problem) to 10 watts (that’s going to be a BIG problem as 2/3rd of the power adapter’s output is already spoken for just for the drive). Basically we’re working with really tight ranges here and you can see why NVMe tends to run afoul but SATA (unless it’s a large HDD) it’s honestly quite hard to hit it as only 1st/2nd gen 2.5″ SSDs (known to be much less power efficient, it was older tech) could possibly consume anywhere near the upper end on that chart. M.2 SATA is also quite hard to hit the limit and those are much more power efficient than NVMe (but capable of much less in the performance category vs. NVMe).
It sounds like you have a great setup going! I wonder if the Rocket might work on a powered hub but it really depends on what your goals on as to whether or not it’s worth it. Thanks for sharing your build!
Thanks for the info. BTW, Watts = Amps * Volts (converter is your brain. ha 😉 ) .
I’ve already formatted it FAT32 and will use the Nano as a regular ‘thumb drive’ now. So probably won’t test as a boot drive for an RPI4 with a powered hub. At least for awhile. The powered hub would ruin the systems compactness concept anyway. The Nano is very well built I must say. Feels heavy/solid in the hand and has a metal case. It just has that one problem that makes it unusable for what I intended it for.
My goal for the little Geek Mini Tower is to have a RPI4 running PI OS 64bit for ARM 64bit development always available on the network. With the RPI4 PDP 11/70 Pi-Hole machine, I have it running the PI OS 32bit, so can test apps over there too on both architechures. Anyway, just to have ‘tools’ available when needed. Other PIs I have are used/will be used for home automation projects, robotics, and such — normal RPI activities !!!
Hey rclark,
I figured by how handy you were with a multi-meter and the way you spoke about the electrical side that you might have that reaction / response to that! I confess, I have more of a software background than an electrical engineering type of background. I was a L3 hardware tech (desktop/laptop/tablet/pc/phone/printers/other IT equipment) for the government up until January of 2021 when I went full time working on my web site but my specialty was scripting / automation! I’ve been developing since I was about 14 with a lot of stuff published on GitHub (so it’s fair to call me more of a developer or something like a hybrid?): TheRemote – GitHub.
I think it’s safe to say you’d school me on a lot of electrical issues as I know / learn at least enough to understand what I’m working with (kind of similar to how I learned programming) but I don’t have an electrical engineering type of degree or anything like that (believe it or not my degree is in Psychology and I had an 8 year social work career before switching to IT for work). It wasn’t just a cold turkey switch of course, I had already been coding / publishing on GitHub for years and had always been into computing. My very first programming projects were basically multiplayer games I was running as a teenager (all open sourced on GitHub now).
I’m definitely diving into the electrical side a lot more these days as embedded device work has brought me way more into that world than I ever was strictly with regular PCs/laptops/tablets/etc. Most of this knowledge I have about the storage specifically is from my experience from years on the site talking with everyone from around the world trying to troubleshoot weird issues with these as well as running https://pibenchmarks.com which required me to dive into a lot of these areas outside of my background out of necessity. I definitely do need to start just remembering some of these formulas though (it will come in handy).
I think the setup sounds excellent! I run the 64 bit flavor mostly now as well. They’re such great devices to have for testing like this. Now you have both a 32 and 64 bit environment! I like it so much better than messing with virtual machines or anything like that. It honestly even lets me dodge having to set up complicated and annoying cross-building chains in some cases. The power and space requirements also can’t be beat.
Thanks for the great conversation and letting me know what you were doing with it! I’m always stunned by the awesome ideas / uses people have for Pis and it’s one of the funnest things about them. Cheers and take care!
My background started with Applied Computer Science BS Degree (only one class short of a math degree too, but was time to leave formal education behind) back in ’86. So had all the math, physics and electronics, and labs that went with it. Got me a job writing real-time programming (C and Assembly for Z80/68XXX/x86 and later even PowerPc) for control systems (RTUs VME systems, and master software) and on the PC desktop side using Borland Turbo Pascal, later Delphi, Borland C/C++ (GUIs/Editors/databases) to support them. Of course cross compiling for the control systems. So very diverse environment which is what I liked about that job. We automated substations hydro plants, and communications systems and such with our own hardware and software. Was very enjoyable work. Even got me out in the field sometimes around the country. We also maintained our own networking and servers (Linux based by then instead of Windows) too. Wore a lot of hats in those days. Now working on the other end of those systems as an EMS (Energy Management System) Analyst for a utility which gathers information from all those sites which keeps the lights on in peoples homes…. Most of my work deals with maintaining the systems (written in C/C++/Fortran) and writing a lot of ‘glue’ code in Python 3 as it works really well in this situation. But it is all higher level stuff….And in the MS Windows world. I prefer Linux though as my OS of choice. Started dabbling with Slackware on floppies, and then Red Hat. Even got our company to put in a Linux Server finally with Red Hat 5 I believe. Saved a lot of money in those days on maintenance (system just ran and ran and ran) … and in user license fees.
But at home I like to dabble with nuts/bolts hardware/software to keep me nearer the hardware side of things as a hobby…. Windows free at home on desktops/laptops/servers. All systems run a flavor of Linux. Hardware wise, we have a lot of great platforms to play with now compared to 80s and 90s… RPIs, Beagle Bones for general purpose and special purpose boards like newer RP2040 based boards, Arduino, Teensy, etc…. Plus the many sensors and such ready built… And it is all relatively affordable too. Good time to be alive. Of course I think every generation says that!!
Enjoyed the conversation too. Maybe we’ll talk again some time 🙂 .
Oh wow, you’re one of the rare ones! You graduated from college the year I was born. I feel like my generation is like 70% of the IT workforce although they aren’t nearly as passionate about it in general I think as you or I are. Maybe this is how it felt for your generation as well and you had a drive above what others in the field around you had (I’d be curious if it felt this way to you).
I’ve absolutely fallen in love with Linux and finally ditched my Windows desktop this year. I left it installed as a dual boot option in case I want to play a game that only works on Windows but honestly I find myself just playing titles that have Linux support within Steam and haven’t even booted it since. I did Ubuntu 20.10 for it but I’m not married to the Ubuntu distro and I’m sure I could find something else that suited my needs better.
I learned everything I know from people like you and you are always the type of IT person I would look up to and want to know as much as you guys. It’s literally a lifetime journey to get there. There’s so much to know. I keep breaking through barriers I never knew how to before (I have some upcoming security research with official registered CVEs / vulnerabilities coming up for a few different cryptocurrency ASIC miners with an embedded device / SBC on board controlling it that are currently in vendor disclosure stage). It’s a bittersweet feeling because you think it’s going to feel like you’ve finally “made it” or “mastered it”.
It turns out it doesn’t feel like that at all. The main thing I’ve learned is how much I still don’t know. Even with the ability to breach and control these devices (which I thought as a card carrying “hacker” maybe I would start to feel like I’ve mastered IT) it almost feels like I know less now that I understand what is possible / what it takes. You break through into these fields where you can understand and even participate and you realize there’s another LIFETIME of knowledge just within that field! There’s no such thing as mastering all of it (or at least I’ve never known or heard of anyone that ever has).
It’s a very valuable lesson though as once you understand that nobody could know everything about every single field in IT (that is impossible in one lifetime) it helps you realize that everyone has their specializations / areas of expertise and it’s okay for those to be different. You can specialize and eventually become an expert on the things you are passionate about. These can and will change over time as the technology evolves (and the people who won’t change with it risk becoming obsolete although in some cases it works out for them like Fortran developers). Everyone has different things to bring to the table for sure!
I’m glad we have you with us in the field and among the Raspberry Pi / Arduino / Teensy / embedded device / SBC world! I’ve collected quite a few of these as well. I also have the Teensy, the Udoo x86 (wanted to try a x86_64 SBC), a Tinkerboard, a couple of Arduinos and I’m sure I’m forgetting some others here and there. I definitely think things are going to continue to move more in this direction toward very small and very power efficient embedded devices (or even a series of embedded devices working together). This has been a great bet since I started the site 5-6 years ago and it’s still my most popular content for sure.
You’re definitely welcome any time and feel free any time to stop by and chime in with some of your knowledge you’ve gained over your career! I’m always willing to learn new things / be challenged as this is my secret / how I grow and learn new things. I hope we talk again sometime as well!
hey James a bit off-topic, since this isn’t a Pi4 question, but since you said RIP to Sabrent, did the Sabrent adapter work well with a 3B(non-plus)? Was also wondering if it had TRIM support if connected
Hey Green_Dragon527,
No problem at all! So the adapter I was referring to in that was the Sabrent SSHD. There are firmware updates that can get that one working even on the Pi 4.
You’re very right to ask about TRIM support though. Just about a week ago spiritmars was working on this.
Their results were that after the firmware update they initially thought they could take it out or quirks mode but I think they had to end up keeping it in quirks mode. You may not have to use quirks mode on the Pi 3 since it boots from USB using a totally different mechanism. I’m not sure if you will have to enable quirks mode manually or not (I think you still may since it’s not using UASP in quirks mode) but it may just work honestly.
It has been years since I tried it on the Pi 3 with the SSHD but originally that was the adapter I had for it back in the day. I would say definitely do the firmware updates for sure and give it a try if you have that adapter already!
I must be missing something!Test recognised both the SD and the portable Samsung T7 but run tests for the SD only. Couldn’t see any “errors” in the output! Is there a trick to it 🙂
Hey Demetre,
That means that the SD card is your current boot device (the root device basically). The test only checks your boot device so this would mean it’s not actually running off the SSD. Have you tried booting with the SD card taken out?
If you just plugged it in to test it that would be normal (I do want to add an option to select which drive to test). If it’s selecting the SD card then you aren’t actually booted into the SSD right now. It’s booting off the SD card still. You may want to try booting with the SD card out (unless you’re not trying to boot and are just trying to test).
I do plan on adding an option to select the drive to test here as that has been requested a few times.
Hopefully that helps!
you’re right! it was a new acquisition was trying
Hey Demetre,
Glad to hear it, take care!
Doesn’t USB 3.0 only provide a maximum of 900mA per port, meaning that as long as you only have one drive plugged in via USB, power draw should always be below the Pi’s 1.2A limit? Or am I missing something here? I know there’s USB PD and similar technologies, but does the Pi even use those?
Hey Daniel,
This is a great question and I only know the answer because someone asked it once before and I had to figure out why the numbers don’t add up.
The answer is there is a long forgotten standard from before USB PD (the Pi doesn’t support this yet, I do expect the next one will and will support USB-PD as it’s part of USB 3.1). This is called USB-BCS 1.2 or “USB Battery Charge Specification”. This mode was meant to provide a little bit of extra power to charge batteries and this is how it is doing it. The other key detail is that it is using a type of USB port called a “Charging Downstream Port” to be able to do this which can provide up to 1.5A.
It’s a great question though and I had to deep dive it in the past. Hopefully that helps!