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
The device identifies as: idVendor 0x152d JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technology Corp.
idProduct 0x0578 JMS567 SATA 6Gb/s bridge
During boot numerous lines are shown regarding abort handling. I have tried 2 of these adapters and both fail during boot. The same drive + adapter works on other linux systems.
So I ordered two CSL 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0 Adapter and I received two APLIC USB 3.0 TYPE-A TO SATA III converter, which I thought was funny. Probably some OEM second source replacement registered in the supply chain in case the original requested one wasn’t available. I see more of the same “looking” devices online with just another brand name printed on it. Anyways, the converter appears to work. Without power supply attached I get only 9MBps max (> hdparm -t /dev/sdX), so that’s a bummer, but with the adapter I get roughly 275MBps, so that’s about right.
The device IDs as (> lsudb -v): idVendor 0x174c ASMedia Technology Inc.
idProduct 0x55aa Name: ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1053E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1153 SATA 3Gb/s bridge, ASM1153E SATA 6Gb/s bridge
Next up is to order another SSD and run the little monster on RAID 1. Does anyone have any experience with this? Some say it doesn’t work that well with respect to speed but I beg to differ…
Great findings, thanks for posting them! For the RAID 1 piece if you are going for raw performance I would recommend RAID 0 (striping). RAID 1 is mirroring mode so it will make an identical copy of all of your data on each disk which is great for redundancy but doesn’t increase performance typically.
Raid 0 on the other hand writes half of the data to each drive so each data only has to write half as much. That may be the one to try!
Thank you very much for that information! I’ve added the EWENT to the naughty list to help others know for sure that this one is one to avoid. Take care!
Greg
3 years ago
James-
This is very informative and helpful. I have been able to get the Samsung 970 plus 500G to boot on my Pi 4, but it fails as soon as I try and expand the filesystem. I have tried doing this several different ways, but with no luck so far. Have you been able to use the majority of the drive? Is there some limitation on the Pi relating to how large the / partition can be?
Max
3 years ago
James,
What’s your opinion on DRAM vs DRAM-less NVMe drives in USB enclosures?
As I understand, DRAM drive caches data in it’s onboard RAM before writing it, so in case of USB-powered enclosures data might not be written (i.e. lost, and potentially file / file system might be corrupted).
Also, DRAM is yet another component that needs power (ergo higher power consumption).
That’s a fantastic question! The DRAM/cache on the drives definitely helps with performance. Since on the Pi most people are going to be using USB 3.0 the maximum performance theoretically caps out at maximum speed of the USB 3.0 bus. Despite this, higher quality drives *still* perform faster even though they should be stuck within the same limitation. The performance differences can actually be explained by this cache! A very nice Samsung 970 NVMe drive for example is going to have a seriously high quality on-board cache which lets commonly accessed data be accessed much more quickly from the cache chip.
Your concerns about power are also valid. Guess which drives are also the most power hungry drives usually requiring a powered USB hub to boot? Those ones. High performance/quality NVMe drives with a high quality cache. They also get incredibly hot!
What I’ve found is that the caches on 2.5″ SSDs don’t seem to raise the power requirements very much but on NVMe drives they definitely do. There’s way more performance, and way more heat on NVMe but on 2.5″ SATA drives. That being said, 2.5″ enclosures can raise the power requirements. Probably the lowest power budget setup is something like a 2.5″ SSD using something like the StarTech adapter instead of an enclosure. That setup would still work great with a DRAM cache!
Your question about the drive caching and data loss when the power is cut is another good question. On Windows you actually can control this caching behavior. It’s a driver setting basically. Check out step #4. Those settings control the caching behavior. If you want to leave it on the mode where you lose everything is the power is cut you get higher performance but have that risk. You can also eliminate this risk by putting it on the lower performance mode.
Hopefully that all helps. Let us know what you end up going with and how it works out!
Antoine
3 years ago
Hi!
Thanks for your posts about Rpi4 boot from SSD, including the compatibility checks!
I run into a problem with the Sabrent Powered USB 3.0 Hub:
When I connect directly my SSD (Kingston Q500 with sabrent usb3.1 adapter – known working list), it works fine!
However, when I connect it through the Sabrent Powered USB 3.0 Hub, I get an error message when booting : usb 1 port2 – Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
It seems that it is a hardware problem and I just need to change the hub, but did you hear about this error?
What powered usb hub would you recommend?
No problem at all for the posts! So there’s a couple of things to try. When I use my Sabrent powered USB hub with my Pi 400 I actually have to disconnect the hub when I connect the power cable and then I plug in the Sabrent USB hub’s cable right afterward (which is what the SSD is plugged into in this configuration).
It may be worth trying to connect the power and then try to connect the Sabrent USB hub right afterward and see if the behavior/boot message changes at all!
The next thing to triple check is your bootloader firmware version using the instructions in this guide. I’ve seen instances where when other commenters double checked the versions when running the firmware update command and realized it wasn’t updating their bootloader firmware. In those cases they used the “recovery image” you can create using the Pi Imager tool and that got it working again. These bootloader updates fix some incompatibilities with certain drives/hubs/adapters/enclosures so it’s definitely worth checking when you have a known working adapter like this.
Definitely give those a try and let me know what you find!
CobraX
3 years ago
Hi James
I’ve got a question, but let me quickly describe my situation. I’m currently using an old PC from 2009 as a fileserver (Windows 7, simple Windows shares, gigabit network with CAT6 ethernet cables) and I also own a Raspberry Pi 2 which runs PiHole 24/7 (Raspberry Pi OS Lite, headless). I’m tired of the bulkiness of the fileserver and I’m thinking of replacing the Raspberry Pi 2 with a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 4GB. Ideally I would like the Raspberry Pi 4 to also be my fileserver (I’d be happy with transfer speeds between 80-100 MB/s).
Now here’s my main question: will I be able to power the setup below using the official Raspberry Pi 4 USB-C power supply (5.1V/3A)?
That sounds like an awesome setup! I think you’ll be fine with a 2.5″ StarTech on SATA USB 3.0. I’ve never found a drive or SSD that I needed anything more than the 3.0A power supply for it personally and I’ve tried dozens of different drives with them. The Kingston A400 is the go-to drive so that will definitely work with it without additional power requirements.
The storage array looks like it’s going to be an absolute monster. My biggest one I have is an old server with a hot swappable 12 TB RAID array of 6 2TB disks. That setup puts it absolutely to shame! Since the HDDs are powered by the QNAP’s power supply you shouldn’t run into any trouble since you’ll only be powering the Kingston A400 off your Pi itself.
Headless setup looks good and is ideal for this, services shouldn’t be a problem, everything looks good to go. I would add some caution that the Pi does have a shared power limit of 1.2A that it can pass through the Pi. Your storage array is not going to count against this limit but your Kingston A400 will. If you start plugging in additional accessories, even something like a keyboard, you could start to get lockups/boot issues and that’s a sign you’re having power issues and may need to consider a hub if it’s too taxing. I think given just what you posted you’ll be fine, but I don’t think you’ll have a *ton* of extra headroom either so I wanted to mention it in case you add additional accessories later. Hopefully that helps!
Hi There,
Nice Blog about RPi4 external mass storage. Thanx!
I can also add that the following device does NOT work with RPi4:
LogiLink Adapter USB 3.0 to SATA (AU0050)
EAN: 4052792050134
The device identifies as:
idVendor 0x152d JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technology Corp.idProduct 0x0578 JMS567 SATA 6Gb/s bridge
During boot numerous lines are shown regarding abort handling. I have tried 2 of these adapters and both fail during boot. The same drive + adapter works on other linux systems.
Hope this info is helpful
Cheers!
Hi Again,
So I ordered two CSL 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0 Adapter and I received two APLIC USB 3.0 TYPE-A TO SATA III converter, which I thought was funny. Probably some OEM second source replacement registered in the supply chain in case the original requested one wasn’t available. I see more of the same “looking” devices online with just another brand name printed on it. Anyways, the converter appears to work. Without power supply attached I get only 9MBps max (> hdparm -t /dev/sdX), so that’s a bummer, but with the adapter I get roughly 275MBps, so that’s about right.
The device IDs as (> lsudb -v):
idVendor 0x174c ASMedia Technology Inc.idProduct 0x55aa Name: ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1053E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1153 SATA 3Gb/s bridge, ASM1153E SATA 6Gb/s bridge
Next up is to order another SSD and run the little monster on RAID 1. Does anyone have any experience with this? Some say it doesn’t work that well with respect to speed but I beg to differ…
Cheers!
Hey Sander,
Great findings, thanks for posting them! For the RAID 1 piece if you are going for raw performance I would recommend RAID 0 (striping). RAID 1 is mirroring mode so it will make an identical copy of all of your data on each disk which is great for redundancy but doesn’t increase performance typically.
Raid 0 on the other hand writes half of the data to each drive so each data only has to write half as much. That may be the one to try!
I use device like this. It works perfect.
1. Argon one 18W adapter
2. Ugreen SSD Enclosure Dual protocol (Chip RTL9210B) with WD SSD Blue SATA 250GB
Hi James,
Thanks for the guide. Fyi: I first bought the EWENT EW7017 which did not work. Then I bought the recommended StarTech and worked flawless!
Thanks,
Hey Wouter,
Thank you very much for that information! I’ve added the EWENT to the naughty list to help others know for sure that this one is one to avoid. Take care!
James-
This is very informative and helpful. I have been able to get the Samsung 970 plus 500G to boot on my Pi 4, but it fails as soon as I try and expand the filesystem. I have tried doing this several different ways, but with no luck so far. Have you been able to use the majority of the drive? Is there some limitation on the Pi relating to how large the / partition can be?
James,
What’s your opinion on DRAM vs DRAM-less NVMe drives in USB enclosures?
As I understand, DRAM drive caches data in it’s onboard RAM before writing it, so in case of USB-powered enclosures data might not be written (i.e. lost, and potentially file / file system might be corrupted).
Also, DRAM is yet another component that needs power (ergo higher power consumption).
Hey Max,
That’s a fantastic question! The DRAM/cache on the drives definitely helps with performance. Since on the Pi most people are going to be using USB 3.0 the maximum performance theoretically caps out at maximum speed of the USB 3.0 bus. Despite this, higher quality drives *still* perform faster even though they should be stuck within the same limitation. The performance differences can actually be explained by this cache! A very nice Samsung 970 NVMe drive for example is going to have a seriously high quality on-board cache which lets commonly accessed data be accessed much more quickly from the cache chip.
Your concerns about power are also valid. Guess which drives are also the most power hungry drives usually requiring a powered USB hub to boot? Those ones. High performance/quality NVMe drives with a high quality cache. They also get incredibly hot!
What I’ve found is that the caches on 2.5″ SSDs don’t seem to raise the power requirements very much but on NVMe drives they definitely do. There’s way more performance, and way more heat on NVMe but on 2.5″ SATA drives. That being said, 2.5″ enclosures can raise the power requirements. Probably the lowest power budget setup is something like a 2.5″ SSD using something like the StarTech adapter instead of an enclosure. That setup would still work great with a DRAM cache!
Your question about the drive caching and data loss when the power is cut is another good question. On Windows you actually can control this caching behavior. It’s a driver setting basically. Check out step #4. Those settings control the caching behavior. If you want to leave it on the mode where you lose everything is the power is cut you get higher performance but have that risk. You can also eliminate this risk by putting it on the lower performance mode.
Linux has some similar commands to enable/disable write caching as well.
Hopefully that all helps. Let us know what you end up going with and how it works out!
Hi!
Thanks for your posts about Rpi4 boot from SSD, including the compatibility checks!
I run into a problem with the Sabrent Powered USB 3.0 Hub:
When I connect directly my SSD (Kingston Q500 with sabrent usb3.1 adapter – known working list), it works fine!
However, when I connect it through the Sabrent Powered USB 3.0 Hub, I get an error message when booting : usb 1 port2 – Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
It seems that it is a hardware problem and I just need to change the hub, but did you hear about this error?
What powered usb hub would you recommend?
Thanks again!
Hey Antoine,
No problem at all for the posts! So there’s a couple of things to try. When I use my Sabrent powered USB hub with my Pi 400 I actually have to disconnect the hub when I connect the power cable and then I plug in the Sabrent USB hub’s cable right afterward (which is what the SSD is plugged into in this configuration).
It may be worth trying to connect the power and then try to connect the Sabrent USB hub right afterward and see if the behavior/boot message changes at all!
The next thing to triple check is your bootloader firmware version using the instructions in this guide. I’ve seen instances where when other commenters double checked the versions when running the firmware update command and realized it wasn’t updating their bootloader firmware. In those cases they used the “recovery image” you can create using the Pi Imager tool and that got it working again. These bootloader updates fix some incompatibilities with certain drives/hubs/adapters/enclosures so it’s definitely worth checking when you have a known working adapter like this.
Definitely give those a try and let me know what you find!
Hi James
I’ve got a question, but let me quickly describe my situation. I’m currently using an old PC from 2009 as a fileserver (Windows 7, simple Windows shares, gigabit network with CAT6 ethernet cables) and I also own a Raspberry Pi 2 which runs PiHole 24/7 (Raspberry Pi OS Lite, headless). I’m tired of the bulkiness of the fileserver and I’m thinking of replacing the Raspberry Pi 2 with a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 4GB. Ideally I would like the Raspberry Pi 4 to also be my fileserver (I’d be happy with transfer speeds between 80-100 MB/s).
Now here’s my main question: will I be able to power the setup below using the official Raspberry Pi 4 USB-C power supply (5.1V/3A)?
– Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 4GB
– FLIRC Raspberry Pi 4 case
– Samsung microSD card (failsafe boot device)
– Kingston A400 120GB 2,5″ SSD (main boot device)
– StarTech 2,5″ SATA to USB 3.0 cable with UASP
– QNAP TR-004 DAS (comes with its own power supply, HDDs in “individual mode”, https://www.qnap.com/en/product/tr-004)
– 4x 8TB 3,5″ HDDs (probably WD Red) formatted as EXT4
– Raspberry Pi OS Lite (headless, access via SSH, PiHole/samba shares/qbittorrent-nox with WebUI)
Hey CobraX,
That sounds like an awesome setup! I think you’ll be fine with a 2.5″ StarTech on SATA USB 3.0. I’ve never found a drive or SSD that I needed anything more than the 3.0A power supply for it personally and I’ve tried dozens of different drives with them. The Kingston A400 is the go-to drive so that will definitely work with it without additional power requirements.
The storage array looks like it’s going to be an absolute monster. My biggest one I have is an old server with a hot swappable 12 TB RAID array of 6 2TB disks. That setup puts it absolutely to shame! Since the HDDs are powered by the QNAP’s power supply you shouldn’t run into any trouble since you’ll only be powering the Kingston A400 off your Pi itself.
Headless setup looks good and is ideal for this, services shouldn’t be a problem, everything looks good to go. I would add some caution that the Pi does have a shared power limit of 1.2A that it can pass through the Pi. Your storage array is not going to count against this limit but your Kingston A400 will. If you start plugging in additional accessories, even something like a keyboard, you could start to get lockups/boot issues and that’s a sign you’re having power issues and may need to consider a hub if it’s too taxing. I think given just what you posted you’ll be fine, but I don’t think you’ll have a *ton* of extra headroom either so I wanted to mention it in case you add additional accessories later. Hopefully that helps!