Best Working SSD / Storage Adapters for Raspberry Pi 4 / 400

Hey Spyros,

Welcome, very nice measurements, this is indeed a tricky one! So you’re actually right on the money here with your concerns. It’s very rare to have power issues with M.2 SATA (on pretty much any drive).

Your measurements actually make it much more clear as to why though. This is almost a better way to show people why this happens. I’d say those numbers are accurate.

To explain what is happening the Pi has a hard limit on how much power it can pass through the USB port. That limit is 1.2A. The difference between 1.7-2W and 3W is enough to go from working perfectly to not able to boot.

I think both of these SATA drives will work without any additional power (and it sounds like the original one already was working which I would expect from those power draw numbers) but I think that the NVMe one may have power issues and want a USB hub to work correctly. You could absolutely do it with a powered USB hub but without one I think you are right to be concerned about the NVMe one.

I would be surprised if it won’t take the 500GB SATA one but it’s possible. It’s pretty uncommon to hit the M.2 SATA power limit but a few people have managed before for sure. Hopefully that helps!

Hey hunggnuh85,

Great questions! So to start with the UGREEN adapter the answer is that most of these can be fixed with firmware updates. This is due to the Pi’s popularity. It is simply smart for them to offer updates that fix these. Not all of them do but the less generic manufacturers (like UGREEN and Sabrent have dozens of different adapters and are pretty big) have firmware updates available that will fix nearly all of these.

A lot of these adapters ship with these firmware updates when you buy them new (but certainly not all of them). My guess is the answer is simply that the firmware has been fixed and is shipping on the adapters from the factory at this point. Plenty of them on the non-working list can be fixed with firmware updates at this point and there will continue to only be more every day that eventually get these updates (it’s smart for the manufacturers to update these, it lowers their return rate and saves them money).

No one can say for certain if you ordered one if you would get one with the new firmware that works or one that doesn’t work still. It just depends what retailer you order from and how long they’ve had them. This one has apparently had fixes out for a couple of years but if you ordered one off Amazon today there’s still an excellent chance you’d get one with firmware that is from 2015. We’ve actually had that happen to people over the years throughout my various SSD booting guides who got *wildly* different firmware versions years sometimes with firmware versions years apart even within the same order if they ordered 2-3.

You could update it on your own but the person from the Amazon review you’re referencing seemed to have no awareness of firmware updates and the truth is that will fix most of them (including 100% for certain one of the Sabrent ones he listed). Just like any other technology device you have yes it can absolutely be updated / fixed *IF* your manufacturer has actually made those updates / tools available to you (which is the sticking point most of the time).

Especially when dealing with Storage adapters and the Pi having a manufacturer that has firmware update downloads available is a must and I’d argue is what you would want to look at and not the chipset. If you buy a Sabrent adapter it will probably still to this day come with broken firmware from 2015 that won’t work with the Pi. Almost all of these have firmware updates available though and I’ve fixed all of mine that are on the naughty list that I personally purchased at this point via firmware updates. If you bought a noname brand one (literally in the case of AliExpress ones sometimes, like there’s no letters or brand printed anywhere) even if it theoretically has a great chipset if the firmware is ancient/broken you will realistically not have many options.

Indeed, the Sabrent adapter the person mentioned in that review led them to choose the UGREEN can 100% be fixed by firmware updates. I have a topic dedicated solely to fixing storage adapters for the Pi via firmware updates here. If your storage company is big enough to have a web site you can find on the internet then there’s an excellent chance these are available and it is the first thing anyone should try if they find themselves with a non working one.

You should definitely check out my storage benchmarking web site Pi Benchmarks. People have tested all of the adapters you have mentioned thousands of times on there. For example take a look searching for the ASM1153E and see how many people have successfully tested these adapters. The truth is there are a lot of people saying whatever in the reviews. I don’t take that too seriously. We have over 40,000 storage benchmarks on the Pi using every adapter you can imagine (and lots that I can’t even identify) so we can actually go to real-world benchmarks / raw data to answer a lot of these questions.

If you guessed that a lot of the common wisdom (or let’s call it “things people say”) surrounding these adapters / storage devices is total nonsense then you absolutely guessed correctly. Some of this stuff I would have never figured out and fully credit people simply benchmarking real devices so we could try to make sense of what is actually good / fast on the Pi. People actually tested them so we can actually just know for sure and it’s all public.

You can even find out which adapters are faster than others using Pi Benchmarks. If you can find a listing for it on a web site then I can almost guarantee you someone (if not dozens or more people) have already bought it and tested it on Pi Benchmarks. This is a great way to find out if they work and if they get good performance. For example some adapters have to run in “quirks” mode which has a performance penalty of about 40-50% and you can find all of this out relatively easy by using the search feature so it’s pretty handy for anything related to storage drives / storage adapters on the Pi (or any SBC)!

In other words keep in mind that it’s more complicated than just the chipset. The firmware updates actually being available for your adapter (they won’t be if it cost $3-$5 on AliExpress for example) is probably a better rule of thumb to use. Companies like StarTech, UGREEN, Sabrent, Orico that have a good official web site with downloads is probably the more important thing to be looking for because you can find hundreds of examples of us fixing these in this article and the one I linked to with firmware updates.

I’d much rather have a mediocre chipset that is well-supported and can be updated than a super fast adapter from a manufacturer that has no updates available for their adapters. Even if it works well on the Pi 4 will it work well on the Pi 5? Nobody knows for sure. I do know for sure though that if you have one from a brand that offers updates though that although it will take some time yours will be fixed eventually via updates. If you got the fast one for the Pi 4 that doesn’t offer firmware updates and that one doesn’t work on the Pi 5 then unless they decide to start offering them all of the sudden and build that infrastructure then that would be a situation where you got burned and would have to buy another adapter 100% for sure.

Unfortunately sometimes I have to give them the bad news that there is no downloads page / firmware updates available for their adapter. That almost always results in them buying a different one. In rare cases we have done generic flashes (using another adapter’s firmware that has the same chipset) and got them to work (and a couple of times it made it worse / more buggy). I’m always relieved when someone tells me it’s a Sabrent or an Orico or some adapter that I know will very likely (not always) have firmware updates available that are extremely likely to fix it. It’s not an exaggeration to say that a lot of these updates came into existence purely to fix Pi support and otherwise probably would have never been offered to the public/consumers as a download at all.

Thank you for sharing your experience, hopefully that helps!

Hey jbfugure,

Welcome, I’m glad you were able to find it as well! So the first thing with this one is that there are firmware updates available for that enclosure that may be able to fix/improve some issues. The Sabrent official download page for the EC-UK30 is here. If you click the “Downloads” section you will see a firmware update tool there.

The second thing to check is the Raspberry Pi firmware itself. This typically is only updated by Raspberry Pi OS and people who run other operating systems (I do) tend to not have up to date firmware. I do have a firmware update guide here for that as well. Sabrent specifically is a brand that has Raspberry Pi firmware update fixes available that can resolve some of these.

Even with both of those fixes applied the Sabrent will never be able to match the performance of the StarTech adapter (that specific Sabrent adapter has a cheaper chipset in it that is less powerful which is why it costs slightly less than the StarTech) but you may be able to get things like UASP or USB 3.0 working. It varies from adapter to adapter which specific issues are fixed but those are a couple of common ones. Fixing TRIM support (sudo fstrim -av) is another issue that is often fixed by updates like this.

I’d love to see the benchmarking results from the StarTech! I am still using that adapter for all of my recent work as well. I’ve done a half dozen SSD booting guides for other single board computers over the past few weeks and used the StarTech for all of them without trouble. It’s widely compatible and fast. I think you’ll really like it.

I look forward to your results for sure!

Hey Jerome,

Welcome, and great questions, you’re touching on some of the really tricky pitfalls and I’m glad you investigated some of these first. You are definitely thinking along the right lines here. So let’s start with the most important detail which is the power cap.

The reason that buying a larger power adapter won’t help on the Pi is that there is actually physical circuitry for voltage regulation in the Pi 4. It will not allow that much power through. This is from the official documentation here.

Model Max power output of USB ports
Pi Zero, 1
500mA per port1

Pi 2, 3, 4
1200mA total across all ports

These are hard, physical limits on the board. It is a total of 1.2A of combined power for *all* of your plugged in USB accessories. If you plug in a keyboard that takes 0.1A of power then you have a total of 1.1A remaining of total available power for everything else / your NVMe drives.

In other words a 2.5A powered USB hub actually gives your NVMe drives literally double the power. Remember, the Pi can only pass through 1.2A of power and that is if you have literally nothing else plugged into it as that limit is shared.

This is why a 5A adapter wouldn’t help basically. You don’t need to buy a special adapter to test this. You can plug in very large USB-C adapters like ones for laptops. I plug in my Dell Laptop one into Pis sometimes (which outputs something crazy like 60-80W) and it will not hurt it because the Pi can’t use any of that power. It will still only draw exactly how much it’s supposed to as power negotiation is part of the USB-C spec (which is why you can plug these in without melting or exploding it, something that was possible and in fact easy to do with early Pi models).

I do recommend the CanaKit adapter sometimes because it’s a 3.5A adapter and the extra little bit of power can help sometimes but going to a 5A or anything like that won’t have any impact because of the power limits on the board. I always caution though that this only gives you a little bit of extra because the Pi is known to go above spec on power (meaning it’s drawing more than it’s supposed to) but definitely not more than half an amp at the most and even that is probably extreme / not the norm.

Now for the NVMe enclosure power requirements (your last paragraph) this is where things get a little interesting. It actually depends the most on what capacity you have. For example I have 2 Samsung 960 EVO drives. One of them is 256GB and that one will work on 3A with any enclosure I have. I have *never* needed a powered hub or enclosure to run it. My 1 TB drive will not even boot. It won’t even post or turn on because it requires so much more power. Now if I plug that 1TB into the Sabrent powered USB hub (or another power source) it will fire right up and work as perfectly as the 256GB.

This is because the larger NVMe drives require more power. They also almost always have higher performance (and even the numbers printed on the box for Samsung will be higher for the 1TB plus versions). This is probably the easiest way to tell rather than the brand. How big is the drive? Is it a small 256GB-512GB? Then there’s an excellent chance it will work off 3A. If it’s 1TB+ it’s extremely unlikely unless it’s an ultra power efficient drive (it probably isn’t, usually only data centers get these drives and they’re scarcely even advertised to consumers).

Using the KVM switch helps. You won’t have to share power from there at least and if you are trying to run off 3A that absolutely does help. If you can power the enclosure another way that works too. Some people get powered enclosures sometimes and this works for the same reason the powered USB hub works: you are not passing that power through the Pi. That’s the key because the Pi is actually what can’t pass the power and what you are bypassing.

In other words the problem isn’t the total available power. It’s actually the amount of power the Pi can pass through USB to other accessories. This is why a powered USB hub or a powered enclosure helps as they draw from different power sources. This will almost certainly be fixed in the Pi 5 as the limits they chose are unfortunately just a little too low for larger NVMe drives (they’re aware of this).
Hopefully that helps explain things a little bit better!