The new Raspberry Pi 4 bootloader has finally come out of beta and made it’s way into the official latest Raspbian! This has been long awaited since when the Raspberry Pi 4 was released it had no native support for booting from USB / Network but it was promised right from the start it would get it through a later update.
This guide will show how to configure the new bootloader and set up your Pi to boot from USB devices as well as the other boot options now available within the Raspberry Pi 4 bootloader.
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 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!
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 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.
The SanDisk Extreme A1-A2 SD card has the best scoring SD card on pibenchmarks.com for years and is second in popularity only to the SanDisk Ultra (often included in combo kits). The application class (A1) means random I/O speeds (very important when running an OS) have to meet a higher standard. There’s no benefit on the Pi for A2 right now so get whichever is cheaper/available.
You may use other types of drives with the Pi such as M.2 SATA to USB 3.0 and m-SATA to USB 3.0. Here’s some adapters I’ve used for those types of drives:
UGREEN M+B Key M.2 Enclosure
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 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!
Another option for M.2 SATA (not NVMe) is to use the Argon One Pi case:
Argon ONE Pi 4 M.2 Case
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!
Power can be a serious problem with these drives. We are learning from the comments that you are especially likely to run into power issues with NVMe enclosures. A powered USB hub or a power adapter that puts out 3.5A comes not only just strongly recommended, it may actually be required that you choose one option or the other for your drive to function.
The specific requirements of how much power you’ll need depend on the adapter/enclosure and the model of your drive itself. As a very rough guideline, older models of drives tend to use more power than newer models of drives. 3.5″ form factor drives also use more power than 2.5″ drives. The earliest SSD models like first and second generation models are also well understood to use significantly more power than newer models. This is due to changes and improvements in technology over the years and even using different more efficient memory like 3D NAND. Some super high end performance drives will consume more power as well.
Here’s the current recommendations based on everyone’s comments combined with stuff I’ve personally used with the Pi:
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.
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
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!
To edit the bootloader configuration you should have a copy of Raspbian on a SD card. Right now support in third party operating systems to do anything with the new Raspberry Pi 4’s firmware or bootloader is very limited / nonexistent. You can use a third party operating system later once you set the boot mode, but to actually make these changes we will use official Raspbian.
First make sure that you have the absolute latest updates and firmware for the Pi. To upgrade all your packages and firmware to the latest version use the following command:
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y
Once the update has completed restart your Pi with a sudo reboot command to apply the latest firmware / kernel updates.
Verify EEPROM Bootloader is up to date
We can check if your Pi’s bootloader firmware is up to date with the following command:
sudo rpi-eeprom-update
If your Raspbian is *very* out of date you may not have this utility and can install it using:
sudo apt install rpi-eeprom
The output from rpi-eeprom-update will look like this if you are not up to date:
BCM2711 detected
VL805 firmware in bootloader EEPROM
*** UPDATE AVAILABLE ***
BOOTLOADER: update available
CURRENT: Thu 3 Sep 12:11:43 UTC 2020 (1599135103)
LATEST: Tue 24 Nov 15:08:04 UTC 2020 (1606230484)
FW DIR: /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/beta
VL805: up-to-date
CURRENT: 000138a1
LATEST: 000138a1
If it says any updates are available they be installed manually by adding ‘-a’ to the end of our previous command like this:
sudo rpi-eeprom-update -a
After the updates finish installing restart your Pi as firmware updates will not be applied until after a reboot. Now if you run rpi-eeprom-update to check for updates again it should say you are on the latest and up to date!
Verify Power Supply Size (3.5A strongly recommended)
Check your Raspberry Pi’s power supply size and make sure it is delivering at least 3.5A. There are a lot of USB C adapters for the Raspberry Pi that are only 3.0A. These will typically work fine, until you plug in something like a SSD which draws power from the Pi and there is nothing left to give.
Most SSDs are quite power efficient but HDDs draw significantly more. Older generations of SSDs used quite a bit more power than newer ones as well. If you are using an older drive or a drive that you know is power hungry you need to pay extra attention to having a quality power source with plenty of capacity.
A good alternative option to relying on the Pi to power the drive is using a powered USB hub* so your drive doesn’t need to draw power from the Pi’s limited power budget. Make sure you get one that is compatible with the Pi as some powered USB hubs won’t work properly with it so check the reviews and do your research to make sure people are using it successfully with the Pi.
Image your bootable drive (your SSD / HDD / USB Flash Drive / etc.) the same way you imaged your micro SD card. You write the image of the operating system you want to run to the disk with Etcher / Win32DiskImager / however you normally would write one.
Once this is finished we are ready to edit the bootloader configuration to tell it to boot to our drive instead of the built in microSD slot.
If you’ve completed the prerequisites you are now ready to edit your Raspberry Pi’s bootloader configuration to tell the Pi to boot from a specified device instead of the built in microSD slot. To edit the bootloader configuration use the following command:
Our target is the BOOT_ORDER parameter in bold above. It is 0x1 in firmware versions up until 2020-05-150 and was changed to 0xf41 (try SD card first, then boot from USB if that fails) in newer versions after that. Here are the different configuration options for the BOOT_ORDER parameter (from Raspberry Pi documentation):
Stop and display error pattern (since 2020-09-03). A power cycle is required to exit this state.
0xf
RESTART
Start again with the first boot order field. (since 2020-09-03)
Raspberry Pi 4 USB BOOT_ORDER Options
The configuration option we want is USB mass storage device boot or option 0x4. We can use this option by itself or combine it with other options in the table placed in the order we want the Pi to try to boot from. To understand how to do this, let’s examine the default Raspberry Pi OS value of 0xf14. The values are read from right to left so this value means it will try USB booting first and then fall back to SD storage next.
If you want to leave the SD card and the “restart on failure” fallback options in place you can change it to 0xf14 (remember, the order is from right to left). Go ahead and use your arrow keys to navigate to the BOOT_ORDER line and change it 0x4 or 0xf14 so it reads:
BOOT_ORDER=0x4
or
BOOT_ORDER=0xf14 (to enable falling back to SD card if USB boot fails)
This translates to attempt to boot from USB mass storage first. If that fails, try to boot from SD card. If that fails, start over from step 1 and try again (back to USB mass storage). As another example, if you wanted to add booting from the network you could add the 0x2 value from the table for the “NETWORK” option and make it the final BOOT_ORDER value 0xf124. If you wanted to change the order so that the network boots first instead you could reorder it to 0xf142.
Choose the appropriate BOOT_ORDER you would like and use your arrow keys to move down to the BOOT_ORDER line. Change the line and press Control+X and then ‘y’ to save your changes. Make sure you have your boot device we set up in the prerequisites section plugged into one of the blueUSB ports as these ports are USB 3.0 and the black USB ports are USB 2.0 (slower). Now restart the Pi.
If all went well the Pi will immediately boot up from your boot device instead of the SD card!
Help, something went wrong!
Try Booting from SD card
Generally if the Pi fails to boot from the USB device it will fall back to booting from the SD card. If the Pi didn’t boot after making the change try unplugging your USB device and just booting from the SD card again by removing power from the Pi and plugging it back in again.
If the device is booting fine from the SD card but not from the external drive double check that you have a compatible adapter and that the drive was imaged correctly. Plug it into a PC and make sure it has the files on it and perhaps try giving it a clean image again just in case something went wrong with imaging the first time.
Verify rpi-eeprom-config configuration
Make sure your changes that we made earlier actually stuck by verifying the configuration using the command:
sudo -E rpi-eeprom-config --edit
and verify that the BOOT_ORDER=0x1 line is changed to BOOT_ORDER=0x4.
Restore Bootloader to Defaults
If things are *really* broken and the Pi will not boot at all with your SD card or otherwise then you may need to restore the bootloader back to defaults.
To do this we need to prepare a SD card with the Raspberry Pi 4 EEPROM boot recovery tool. The easiest way to do this is to use the official Raspberry Pi Imager tool from the Raspberry Pi foundation to prepare the recovery image.
Here is how we create the recovery image inside the utility. Choose the “Misc utility images” category as shown below:
Raspberry Pi Imager Step #1
Next choose the “Raspberry Pi 4 EEPROM boot recovery” option:
Raspberry Pi Imager Step #2
Next choose your SD card and then choose “Write”. Now unplug your Pi and put in the newly prepared SD card. Connect the power and let it boot. This will restore your bootloader to defaults. You should see a continuous rapid green blinking light. You may now disconnect the power and put your original SD card back / reinstall Raspbian and boot the Pi normally!
The beta firmware released since the original USB mass storage device support launched contains a bunch of fixes related to USB mass storage devices and USB booting. The downside is the beta firmware is not as well tested so you shouldn’t install it unless you are doing it to fix a specific issue addressed in those updates.
To switch to the beta channel edit the configuration file with the following command:
sudo nano /etc/default/rpi-eeprom-update
Change the line FIRMWARE_RELEASE_STATUS=”critical” (sometimes it can be “stable”) to:
FIRMWARE_RELEASE_STATUS="beta"
Now press Ctrl+X and then ‘y’ to save our changes in nano. Now execute a Pi firmware update using:
sudo rpi-eeprom-update -a
The updater will tell you whether updates were applied or not. Now do a full reboot of your Pi as the firmware updates won’t be applied until you do! If you want to switch back to normal firmware simply change the configuration back to “stable” or “critical”.
Verify Drive Performance
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!
Fix (some) USB Adapter Problems Using Quirks
Some of the very common adapters on the naughty list above (such as the Sabrent) can be made to work by using USB quirks to disable UAS mode on the drive. This lowers performance, but it’s still much faster than a SD card and your adapter won’t go to waste.
To find out the quirks we need to find the device ID string for your adapter and then add an entry to cmdline.txt telling the kernel to apply them on boot.
Find Your Adapter
To apply the quirks we first need to get the adapter id. We will use the sudo lsusb command:
$ sudo lsusb
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 174c:55aa ASMedia Technology Inc. Name: ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1053E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1153 SATA 3Gb/s bridge, ASM1153E SATA 6Gb/s bridge
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 2109:3431 VIA Labs, Inc. Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
On line 2 we can see my ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge adapter (it’s the known working StarTech.com 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.1* adapter). You will see something very similar to mine when you run the command and it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out which device it is. If you need more information add a -v switch to make the command sudo lsusb -v. This can sometimes add some additional details to make it easier to figure out which one is your adapter.
If you’re still not sure, we have another command that between the two that can narrow things down. Type / paste the following:
sudo dmesg | grep usb
[0.828535] usb usb3: New USB device found, idVendor=1d6b, idProduct=0002, bcdDevice= 4.19
[0.828568] usb usb3: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=2, SerialNumber=1
[0.828597] usb usb3: Product: DWC OTG Controller
[0.828620] usb usb3: Manufacturer: Linux 4.19.75-v7l+ dwc_otg_hcd
[0.828644] usb usb3: SerialNumber: fe980000.usb
[0.830051] usbcore: registered new interface driver uas
[0.830182] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
[0.836488] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid
[0.836511] usbhid: USB HID core driver
[0.971598] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
[1.154217] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=2109, idProduct=3431, bcdDevice= 4.20
[1.154254] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=1, SerialNumber=0
[1.154281] usb 1-1: Product: USB2.0 Hub
[1.301989] usb 2-1: new SuperSpeed Gen 1 USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
[1.332965] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=174c, idProduct=55aa, bcdDevice= 1.00
[1.332999] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=1
[1.333026] usb 2-1: Product: ASM105x
[1.333048] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: ASMT
[1.333071] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 123456789B79F
This is the dmesg log showing the hardware detection as hardware is activated on the Pi. If your log is really long you can generate fresh entries by just unplugging a device and plugging it back in and running the command again. Here we can clearly see that the ASM105x is what our StarTech adapter is being detected as.
Now we can go back to our first lsusb command and we want the 8 characters from the ID field that comes right after the Device:
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 174c:55aa ASMedia Technology Inc. Name: ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge
Our adapter’s ID is: 174c:55aa
Applying Quirks
To apply the quirks to our USB adapter we are going to edit /boot/cmdline.txt. Type:
sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt
We are going to add the following entry into the very front of cmdline.txt:
usb-storage.quirks=XXXX:XXXX:u
In place of the X’s above you will put in your adapter’s ID that we got before. With the example commands I gave above mine would look like this: usb-storage.quirks=174c:55aa:u. After this my cmdline.txt looks like this (everything should be one continuous line, no line breaks!):
Now reboot the Pi. If the Pi fails to boot you can plug the SD card into the computer and go to /boot/cmdline.txt and undo the change we did so you can boot back in with your SD card.
Verifying Quirks
Once you have rebooted after changing cmdline.txt we can verify the quirks have been applied by doing another dmesg | grep usb command:
sudo dmesg | grep usb
[1.332924] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=174c, idProduct=55aa, bcdDevice= 1.00
[1.332957] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=1
[1.332983] usb 2-1: Product: ASM105x
[1.333006] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: ASMT
[1.333028] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 123456789B79F
[1.335967] usb 2-1: UAS is blacklisted for this device, using usb-storage instead
[1.336071] usb 2-1: UAS is blacklisted for this device, using usb-storage instead
[1.336103] usb-storage 2-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[1.336479] usb-storage 2-1:1.0: Quirks match for vid 174c pid 55aa: c00000
[1.336611] scsi host0: usb-storage 2-1:1.0
This time we can see in dmesg that UAS was blacklisted for the device and it has loaded with the usb-storage driver instead. This driver tends to be more compatible with the “problematic adapters” but the performance is usually significantly lower. It’s definitely worth a try though as some adapters do better with the quirks performance-wise. The only way to know for sure is to run a benchmark (see “Verify Drive Performance” section).
If you want to see which Pi storage performs the fastest and get an idea of what kind of drives to look for check out my 2022 Raspberry Pi Storage Benchmarks
James
Thanks for what you are doing, it is really helpful.
BUT
Do you maintain your list based on user feedback like this? How did you verify that this adapter is indeed working, and is not just a vendor promoting his own product?
Thanks for the kind words! When I originally wrote the list I personally had all of the adapters on it but it was only 5 adapters. You’re absolutely correct that everything since then over the past year or so has been added based on user feedback. I definitely do not have all 30 of these different storage adapters in the house!
This has worked well so far. There has only been one instance where an adapter reported as working seems to not be working now (conflicting reports, early on someone said yes then later on several others confirmed no) and that is the ELUTENG adapter. It’s definitely a valid concern though so everyone should understand that since it is based on user feedback this leaves open the possibility for manipulation. The longer this post continues to get traffic or continues to grow in popularity the more likely it is that this will happen eventually.
I have pretty strict spam filtering on the blog. When you post a comment and it asks you for your email address it actually doesn’t really matter what you put in there. I don’t collect your email addresses or use them in any way. They are just a field in the comment submission form used for anti-spam verification. I’ve seen people put in “whydoyouneedit@fake.com” and things like that. I love that because the only thing they are used for is to verify that it’s a real person and not a spammer. Spammers try to make them look real in ways that are predictable enough that systems like Akismet can instantly recognize 99% of it. I think the “Akismet” antispam plugin definitely deserves a lot of credit for this list not getting spammed to oblivion yet.
Still, that is only because it hasn’t been big enough to be a target for anything more than automated bots. If some spammer personally is targeting the blog they are going to get through that defense layer because at that point they *are* a real human and are actively opening the site and posting a comment to misrepresent their product. It may only be a matter of time as there are a multitude of issues with Pi storage adapters that may take several more generations of adapters or even Pis themselves before 100% of everything is plug and play and fully compatible to the point where you can buy any adapter without checking anymore.
If this were to start happening I would have to start being more “strict” and only put them on the list if there were like, 3 individual confirmations from different people for example to make it not worth their time to try to spam the blog with non-legit junk. If this still wasn’t enough I would potentially have to go as far as personally buy every single one of them and test them myself to really be sure and hope that the affiliate click earnings from Amazon and friends can pay for the cost of it eventually (the rates for electronics are the lowest paying category by far, less than 2% on $10-$20 items, so it takes a LOT of storage adapters to pay for one!).
So far though the post seems to be helping people and I don’t think I’m big enough blog to have been personally targeted by anything more than an automated bot yet! I do appreciate the feedback though and I share these concerns with you and wanted to let you know I am watching for them and constantly reevaluating my approach based on if things are working or if people are trying to manipulate the process!
James
Appreciate your extensive and open reply, and your ownership and involvement to reply in the first place.
This is surely useful for others who may have the same thoughts. Thanks!
Ugreen SATA USB Converter USB 3.0 USB C to SATA Adapter For 2.5” HDD/SSD External Hard Drive Disk 5Gbps SATA to USB Cable
* ASM1153E chipset
* was using it with RPi3B+ for over a month and now for some time with RPi4B 2GB
* eeprom version 2021-01-14 (stable)
Hello James,
first of all many thanks for this guide how to use USB boot with RPI4.
I followed your instructions, bought a UGREEN 2.5″ SATA to USB-C 3.1 Enclosure Drive Caddy and a 120GB Sandisk Plus SSD and installed the actual RPIOS in lite version on the SSD via Winimager. I have additionally installed OWFS and FHEM.
On an SD card it works completely fine and also on the SSD it works identically but the difference is that when I boot from SSD the activity led is nearly on all the time. It seems that something is repeated all the time since the led is off for a moment and then again on for ~ 1 minute and this is repeated endlessly.
I used the identical image for both, the SD card and the SSD so I have no glue, what makes the difference.
I checked if a process consumes too much CPU time but there in only 1-3% cpu time indicated in the top tool.
Do you have any idea, where this behaviour comes from and what I can do against?
Is your SD card still in the Pi or is it taken out? If my hunch is correct it is polling for the SD card to be inserted. If you put the SD card in after you boot up from the SSD does the CPU usage go away? If so the fix back then (and I think would still be now) is adding the following line to config.txt:
dtoverlay=sdtweak,poll_once
This tells it to only check for the SD card once instead of continuously which is apparently continuous enough to register a couple % CPU usage! Can you give that a try and see what happens?
Hi James,
thanks a lot for your hint!
The behaviour is definitely linked to the SD card inserted.
I have an old SD card with 512 MB FAT32 formatted but no files on it and once this card is in the slot, the system boots correctly from SSD and no further activity can be seen.
The link you provided and the measure with
dtoverlay=sdtweak,poll_once
seems not to work on Pi4.
I could not see a change in beaviour after I added this line to config.txt.
So I can live with the solution to have an old SD card in the slot but nevertheless I think, that this is misbehaviour and should be fixed in a future release.
Are there more people observing the same behaviour on RPI4?
Dang, I was hoping that the old way would still work! I’m glad you were able to confirm that the behavior is definitely related to whether the SD card is inserted or not.
Fantastic! Thanks for being the guinea pig to test these config.txt options.
I honestly believe everyone is probably getting this that takes the SD card out. I’m sure I’m getting it too. I think you’re just the first one to notice that this is still happening on 4B (which up until recently couldn’t do true USB booting so it never came up) so kudos to you being such an astute observer of your system’s resources!
It’s an ancient bug. I remembered it from the Pi 3B days. I have no idea why it would poll so fast that it would register as actual CPU usage instead of checking just like, once per second!
This is probably article-worthy stuff here and I will add it into the guide as well!
I had the bad luck of not being thorough enough and ordered the Sabrent USB 3.0 to 2.5″ SATA adapter. When it didn’t work, that’s when I found this information here. Fortunately, I found this page to be helpful in deciding which ones actually work so I ordered a ELUTENG 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0 Adapter from the Amazon link above. Checking out the reviews, seemed like a slam dunk so I bought it… BUT after failing to boot in 3.0 with updated EEPROM etc etc etc and checking via lsusb it does appear to have one of the JMicron chips in it, and thus doesn’t actually work. I haven’t gotten it working yet. You can see a review on Amazon where someone else had reported this as a possibility, and I am here to confirm that I am still trying to make something work for me. Maybe reconsider ELUTENG on your list, I had double bad luck.
That’s terrible, I’m sorry to hear it! I’ve immediately removed the ELUTENG adapter from the good list and alerted people to avoid it. I think someone else was having trouble with this one in another thread too so it’s time to move it.
Thanks for letting us know, hopefully it spares others the same experience going forward!
No problem! For how bummed I am, I’m also pretty stoked to be able to contribute to others avoiding the same bad luck!
Page is a great resource, good on you for keeping it up to date for people! Benchmark tool is pretty sweet too. Thanks
I appreciate it! I had the same experience when I wrote my very first USB booting guide and wanted to try to help steer others in the right direction and away from the really common bad drives.
If the manufacturers change anything or new models come up people have left comments with them and so it keeps growing and getting revised. I’m also trying to learn more about them via the storage benchmark which has been getting a major overhaul. We’re looking at things like firmware versions, etc. which can apparently fix some adapters and improve performance on others!
It’s definitely not a perfect system but over time it has become pretty comprehensive with adapters from all over the world thanks to everyone’s feedback!
Thanks for the update. I’ve added a note that it only works with quirks mode enabled, which as you stated is not ideal and will have a performance penalty. It’s better than nothing though for sure!
Some other commenters have brought up firmware updates fixing these in some cases. It may be worth seeing if you can google your adapter’s (both the ELUTENG and the Sabrent) model and see if there’s any firmware updates available!
I did find the Sabrent firmware update, however installing it didn’t make a difference for me personally. I haven’t found anything at all for ELUTENG, but did discover an alternative work around some might find interesting to also get my Eluteng AND the Sabrent 3.0 to boot from USB 3.0 ports. Having done a firmware update recently on the adapter on a NesPi4 case (that originally came up on my Windows PC as a JMicron), I got brave and reversed the USB Quirks method I used earlier with the Eluteng and tried to use Retroflag’s firmware update using my drive and the adapter. Not sure of the pros and cons, but it did work! Then I followed up with the Sabrent, did the same thing and viola boot. I understand both methods disable UAS in some fashion, but I thought this was worth sharing. Both booted, and there was no need to edit the cmdline.txt. and no blacklisting text. Thoughts anyone?
I am not sure yet! I don’t think anyone has tested that fix. Have you taken the storage benchmark with it yet at Pi Benchmarks?
We should be able to compare it both with other people using the same drive and the same drive with different adapters to see if you are getting good performance or not!
Excellent, thanks Ryan! I’ve been adding new drives and models like crazy as well as working on making it display additional information. These kinds of comments inside the tests help a lot with identification and all sorts of future stuff I haven’t even thought of yet!
I’m working on some metadata pages like a “Brand” page that shows you an overview of a specific model or brand of a storage device and benchmarks for that model and a couple other cool exciting things. It should keep improving here!
M.Yusuf
Hi, just to report that I purchased “ORICO M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure, USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps)” and it is working out of the box. Raspberry Pi 4 8GB using Raspbian 64-bit.
This is the cheapest enclosure with RTL9210 controller that I could find.
Thanks for letting us know! I don’t think I have seen that model before. I’ve added it to the list!
I haven’t seen a lot of USB 3.2 results showing up on my storage benchmark web site yet and this is one of very few first adapters I’ve seen feedback for that has it. USB 3.1 started out that way but is now the norm and I expect that we’re seeing the first wave of 3.2 adapters. Hopefully they won’t be too problematic with the Pi!
The Samsung T7 Portable drive currently is registering as USB 3.2 on the benchmarks and it’s one of the top drives out there so it seems like there is some benefit to these if the drive/chipset can take advantage of those speeds!
I couldn’t find if it has already been mentioned in the comments, but after following this guide I kept booting from my SD card when trying to setup the USB to boot first then the SD card if failure.
After looking around the BOOT_ORDER section of the Raspberry Pi documentation
I believe that the boot order is decided from right to left. In trying to achieve booting from:
1) USB
2) SD card if USB failed
3) restarting if both of those failed
Setting BOOT_ORDER=0xf14 gives me the desired result. BOOT_ORDER=0xf41 does not.
That’s a good catch. I think you’re right. I have been just taking the SD card out of mine which makes it fall back in that mode. I will update the guide, thanks for pointing this out!
Hello there,
Another adapter working with Pi4
The price is really interesting!
That is an interesting price! Thanks, I’ve added it to the list!
James
Thanks for what you are doing, it is really helpful.
BUT
Do you maintain your list based on user feedback like this? How did you verify that this adapter is indeed working, and is not just a vendor promoting his own product?
Hey JoFie,
Thanks for the kind words! When I originally wrote the list I personally had all of the adapters on it but it was only 5 adapters. You’re absolutely correct that everything since then over the past year or so has been added based on user feedback. I definitely do not have all 30 of these different storage adapters in the house!
This has worked well so far. There has only been one instance where an adapter reported as working seems to not be working now (conflicting reports, early on someone said yes then later on several others confirmed no) and that is the ELUTENG adapter. It’s definitely a valid concern though so everyone should understand that since it is based on user feedback this leaves open the possibility for manipulation. The longer this post continues to get traffic or continues to grow in popularity the more likely it is that this will happen eventually.
I have pretty strict spam filtering on the blog. When you post a comment and it asks you for your email address it actually doesn’t really matter what you put in there. I don’t collect your email addresses or use them in any way. They are just a field in the comment submission form used for anti-spam verification. I’ve seen people put in “whydoyouneedit@fake.com” and things like that. I love that because the only thing they are used for is to verify that it’s a real person and not a spammer. Spammers try to make them look real in ways that are predictable enough that systems like Akismet can instantly recognize 99% of it. I think the “Akismet” antispam plugin definitely deserves a lot of credit for this list not getting spammed to oblivion yet.
Still, that is only because it hasn’t been big enough to be a target for anything more than automated bots. If some spammer personally is targeting the blog they are going to get through that defense layer because at that point they *are* a real human and are actively opening the site and posting a comment to misrepresent their product. It may only be a matter of time as there are a multitude of issues with Pi storage adapters that may take several more generations of adapters or even Pis themselves before 100% of everything is plug and play and fully compatible to the point where you can buy any adapter without checking anymore.
If this were to start happening I would have to start being more “strict” and only put them on the list if there were like, 3 individual confirmations from different people for example to make it not worth their time to try to spam the blog with non-legit junk. If this still wasn’t enough I would potentially have to go as far as personally buy every single one of them and test them myself to really be sure and hope that the affiliate click earnings from Amazon and friends can pay for the cost of it eventually (the rates for electronics are the lowest paying category by far, less than 2% on $10-$20 items, so it takes a LOT of storage adapters to pay for one!).
So far though the post seems to be helping people and I don’t think I’m big enough blog to have been personally targeted by anything more than an automated bot yet! I do appreciate the feedback though and I share these concerns with you and wanted to let you know I am watching for them and constantly reevaluating my approach based on if things are working or if people are trying to manipulate the process!
James
Appreciate your extensive and open reply, and your ownership and involvement to reply in the first place.
This is surely useful for others who may have the same thoughts. Thanks!
Thank you JoFie, it is appreciated, take care!
Hi! What exactly model did you buy? there are four listed
Hi, just wanted to let you know, that these 2 adapters work:
Ugreen HDD Case 2.5 SATA to USB 3.0 Adapter Hard Drive Enclosure for SSD Disk HDD Box Type C 3.1 Case HD External HDD Enclosure
* ASM235CM chipset
* works smoothly for over a month RPi4B 4GB
* eeprom version 2020-12-11 (stable)
Ugreen SATA USB Converter USB 3.0 USB C to SATA Adapter For 2.5” HDD/SSD External Hard Drive Disk 5Gbps SATA to USB Cable
* ASM1153E chipset
* was using it with RPi3B+ for over a month and now for some time with RPi4B 2GB
* eeprom version 2021-01-14 (stable)
Thanks Michal, I’ve added both of these to the list!
Hi, does trim work on the “Ugreen HDD Case 2.5 SATA to USB 3.0 Adapter Hard Drive Enclosure for SSD Disk HDD Box Type C 3.1 Case HD External HDD Enclosure“?
Does it also work with UASP?
Thanks in advance.
Hello James,
first of all many thanks for this guide how to use USB boot with RPI4.
I followed your instructions, bought a UGREEN 2.5″ SATA to USB-C 3.1 Enclosure Drive Caddy and a 120GB Sandisk Plus SSD and installed the actual RPIOS in lite version on the SSD via Winimager. I have additionally installed OWFS and FHEM.
On an SD card it works completely fine and also on the SSD it works identically but the difference is that when I boot from SSD the activity led is nearly on all the time. It seems that something is repeated all the time since the led is off for a moment and then again on for ~ 1 minute and this is repeated endlessly.
I used the identical image for both, the SD card and the SSD so I have no glue, what makes the difference.
I checked if a process consumes too much CPU time but there in only 1-3% cpu time indicated in the top tool.
Do you have any idea, where this behaviour comes from and what I can do against?
Thanks in advance
Best Regards
Harald
Hey Harald,
I actually have heard of this before but it has been a long time! I remember this issue from old USB booting pre-Pi4 days.
Is your SD card still in the Pi or is it taken out? If my hunch is correct it is polling for the SD card to be inserted. If you put the SD card in after you boot up from the SSD does the CPU usage go away? If so the fix back then (and I think would still be now) is adding the following line to config.txt:
dtoverlay=sdtweak,poll_onceThis tells it to only check for the SD card once instead of continuously which is apparently continuous enough to register a couple % CPU usage! Can you give that a try and see what happens?
Hi James,
thanks a lot for your hint!
The behaviour is definitely linked to the SD card inserted.
I have an old SD card with 512 MB FAT32 formatted but no files on it and once this card is in the slot, the system boots correctly from SSD and no further activity can be seen.
The link you provided and the measure with
dtoverlay=sdtweak,poll_once
seems not to work on Pi4.
I could not see a change in beaviour after I added this line to config.txt.
So I can live with the solution to have an old SD card in the slot but nevertheless I think, that this is misbehaviour and should be fixed in a future release.
Are there more people observing the same behaviour on RPI4?
Nevertheless thanks again
BR
Harald
Hey Harald,
Dang, I was hoping that the old way would still work! I’m glad you were able to confirm that the behavior is definitely related to whether the SD card is inserted or not.
I did find a reference to a config.txt parameter that looked a little bit more up to date that you can try:
dtparam=sd_poll_onceinstead of the old sdtweak parameter and see if that gets it too!
Hi James,
thanks a lot for this hint!!!
It solved my problem 🙂
The RPI now behaves exactly the same way as if I had booted from SD card.
Once again thanks for your engagement!
(A Linux beginner like me would be lost completely here)
Best Regards
Harald
Hey Harald,
Fantastic! Thanks for being the guinea pig to test these config.txt options.
I honestly believe everyone is probably getting this that takes the SD card out. I’m sure I’m getting it too. I think you’re just the first one to notice that this is still happening on 4B (which up until recently couldn’t do true USB booting so it never came up) so kudos to you being such an astute observer of your system’s resources!
It’s an ancient bug. I remembered it from the Pi 3B days. I have no idea why it would poll so fast that it would register as actual CPU usage instead of checking just like, once per second!
This is probably article-worthy stuff here and I will add it into the guide as well!
Harald,
What did you use to adapt the USB-C cable to the USB connector on the RPI4?
Regards,
Gary
I had the bad luck of not being thorough enough and ordered the Sabrent USB 3.0 to 2.5″ SATA adapter. When it didn’t work, that’s when I found this information here. Fortunately, I found this page to be helpful in deciding which ones actually work so I ordered a ELUTENG 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0 Adapter from the Amazon link above. Checking out the reviews, seemed like a slam dunk so I bought it… BUT after failing to boot in 3.0 with updated EEPROM etc etc etc and checking via lsusb it does appear to have one of the JMicron chips in it, and thus doesn’t actually work. I haven’t gotten it working yet. You can see a review on Amazon where someone else had reported this as a possibility, and I am here to confirm that I am still trying to make something work for me. Maybe reconsider ELUTENG on your list, I had double bad luck.
Hey Ryan,
That’s terrible, I’m sorry to hear it! I’ve immediately removed the ELUTENG adapter from the good list and alerted people to avoid it. I think someone else was having trouble with this one in another thread too so it’s time to move it.
Thanks for letting us know, hopefully it spares others the same experience going forward!
No problem! For how bummed I am, I’m also pretty stoked to be able to contribute to others avoiding the same bad luck!
Page is a great resource, good on you for keeping it up to date for people! Benchmark tool is pretty sweet too. Thanks
I appreciate it! I had the same experience when I wrote my very first USB booting guide and wanted to try to help steer others in the right direction and away from the really common bad drives.
If the manufacturers change anything or new models come up people have left comments with them and so it keeps growing and getting revised. I’m also trying to learn more about them via the storage benchmark which has been getting a major overhaul. We’re looking at things like firmware versions, etc. which can apparently fix some adapters and improve performance on others!
It’s definitely not a perfect system but over time it has become pretty comprehensive with adapters from all over the world thanks to everyone’s feedback!
Update: Used USB Quirks workaround shown above, and ELUTENG adapter is in fact booting from USB 3.0 port. It’s not ideal, but it is a work around.
Hey Ryan,
Thanks for the update. I’ve added a note that it only works with quirks mode enabled, which as you stated is not ideal and will have a performance penalty. It’s better than nothing though for sure!
Some other commenters have brought up firmware updates fixing these in some cases. It may be worth seeing if you can google your adapter’s (both the ELUTENG and the Sabrent) model and see if there’s any firmware updates available!
I did find the Sabrent firmware update, however installing it didn’t make a difference for me personally. I haven’t found anything at all for ELUTENG, but did discover an alternative work around some might find interesting to also get my Eluteng AND the Sabrent 3.0 to boot from USB 3.0 ports. Having done a firmware update recently on the adapter on a NesPi4 case (that originally came up on my Windows PC as a JMicron), I got brave and reversed the USB Quirks method I used earlier with the Eluteng and tried to use Retroflag’s firmware update using my drive and the adapter. Not sure of the pros and cons, but it did work! Then I followed up with the Sabrent, did the same thing and viola boot. I understand both methods disable UAS in some fashion, but I thought this was worth sharing. Both booted, and there was no need to edit the cmdline.txt. and no blacklisting text. Thoughts anyone?
I am not sure yet! I don’t think anyone has tested that fix. Have you taken the storage benchmark with it yet at Pi Benchmarks?
We should be able to compare it both with other people using the same drive and the same drive with different adapters to see if you are getting good performance or not!
Not yet, but I’ll definitely do it with both adapters on my Samsung 860 Evo with a note that is was using the Retroflag firmware.
Excellent, thanks Ryan! I’ve been adding new drives and models like crazy as well as working on making it display additional information. These kinds of comments inside the tests help a lot with identification and all sorts of future stuff I haven’t even thought of yet!
I’m working on some metadata pages like a “Brand” page that shows you an overview of a specific model or brand of a storage device and benchmarks for that model and a couple other cool exciting things. It should keep improving here!
Hi, just to report that I purchased “ORICO M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure, USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps)” and it is working out of the box. Raspberry Pi 4 8GB using Raspbian 64-bit.
This is the cheapest enclosure with RTL9210 controller that I could find.
Hey M.Yusuf,
Interesting! That one looks a *lot* like the Icy Box but I hadn’t seen it yet before.
I think that would make it the first Orico brand enclosure that has worked!
I’ve added it to the list. Thanks again!
I have the same Orico enclosure and can also report it works. Benchmarks submitted.
I had issues getting this setup with a FIDECO M207CPS USB3.2 to M2 NVME/SATA SSD Enclosure
Hey Lee,
Thanks for letting us know! I don’t think I have seen that model before. I’ve added it to the list!
I haven’t seen a lot of USB 3.2 results showing up on my storage benchmark web site yet and this is one of very few first adapters I’ve seen feedback for that has it. USB 3.1 started out that way but is now the norm and I expect that we’re seeing the first wave of 3.2 adapters. Hopefully they won’t be too problematic with the Pi!
The Samsung T7 Portable drive currently is registering as USB 3.2 on the benchmarks and it’s one of the top drives out there so it seems like there is some benefit to these if the drive/chipset can take advantage of those speeds!
I couldn’t find if it has already been mentioned in the comments, but after following this guide I kept booting from my SD card when trying to setup the USB to boot first then the SD card if failure.
After looking around the BOOT_ORDER section of the Raspberry Pi documentation
I believe that the boot order is decided from right to left. In trying to achieve booting from:
1) USB
2) SD card if USB failed
3) restarting if both of those failed
Setting BOOT_ORDER=0xf14 gives me the desired result. BOOT_ORDER=0xf41 does not.
Hey Cristian,
That’s a good catch. I think you’re right. I have been just taking the SD card out of mine which makes it fall back in that mode. I will update the guide, thanks for pointing this out!