**The new Raspberry Pi bootloader is out which makes these instructions only necessary if you want to continue to use the SD card as a bootloader. View the Raspberry Pi Bootloader Configuration Guide here!**
The Raspberry Pi 4* is finally here and has a lot of exciting changes. One very major downside is that it doesn’t support true USB booting yet out of the box (like the 3 series did). The Raspberry Pi foundation states that it is being worked on and will be added back with a future update. No timeline has been given yet for that to happen but they state it’s one of their top priorities.
Most of my projects heavily depend on having good performing storage so sitting and waiting was not an acceptable solution. In this guide I’ll show you a workaround to use USB devices as your rootfs device and use a Micro SD card as bootloader only which gives us full SSD performance after boot! To see exactly how much of a performance difference this makes (spoiler: it’s gigantic) check out the Raspberry Pi Storage Benchmarks.
I highly recommend doing this on a completely new install. If you try to upgrade your old ones and something goes wrong there’s a good chance you might lose data. We will be modifying the boot partition, resizing partitions, etc. so don’t use a drive with any data on it unless you are positive you have all of the steps down!
Compatible USB Adapters
The Raspberry Pi 4 is proving to be picky about what SATA, M.2, etc. adapters will work in the USB 3.0 port. The USB 3.0 ports are the ones in the middle that are blue inside. The black ones are USB 2.0 and won’t give you the faster speeds the new Pi offers.
It’s very likely that some of these will be fixed via software and firmware updates and the Raspberry Pi Foundation has several open known issues related to USB 3. Until that happens though I will maintain a list here of known working ones and known problematic ones. It’s still very early in the release of the Pi 4 so we still have a lot to learn about which adapters work / don’t work. If you have working and nonworking adapters leave a comment and I’ll add it in this list.
If the adapters worked before on older Pis then one thing you can try is putting them in the black USB 2.0 ports. Obviously this is stupid because we all want the Pi 4 performance gains but if you end up needing to buy a new adapter this will give you a workaround until a replacement arrives!
Find USB adapter chipset
There are certain chipsets used in adapters that are known to be working/not working.
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ 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
This is a lsusb dump of all my connected USB devices. I have bolded the line with the USB bridge device. We can see that the chipset is ASM1153E. This is a really common one that works well with the Pi.
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!
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 SanDisk Extreme Pro USB SSD is a true solid state drive. This is different than a typical “flash drive” which uses extremely cheap memory and has very low random I/O performance/throughput compared to a real solid state drive. I’ve used both the USB 3.1 and USB 3.2 variants with the Pi successfully and they benchmark very well!
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:
VL716 mSATA Enclosure
The VL716 mSATA enclosure lets you connect micro SATA drives to the Pi. These drives are an older type of SSD (usually seen in laptops) predating the M.2 slot but are still widely available and perform extremely well!
The UGREEN M+B enclosure is a great enclosure for the Pi for M.2 SATA 2280 NGFF drives. It supports both B-key and M-key drives. Does not support newer NVMe drives. As with other types of enclosures it requires more power than other options!
The Argon ONE M.2 is a M.2 SATA Pi 4 case / storage solution. With the case and M.2 SATA expansion board you can completely enclosure your Pi 4 and have a built in M.2 slot! The M.2 SATA board is sometimes sold separately from the case itself and can be used as well. Does not support NVMe, this is for SATA M.2 drives only!
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
Fixing (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 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 storage benchmark section near the end).
USB Boot Instructions
There are a lot of steps to follow to set everything up properly. If you make a mistake the first time don’t spend too much time trying to correct it or figure out what you did wrong. It’s usually faster to burn the images again and reconfigure again rather than try to figure out which step you might have made a typo on. It’s much easier the second time!
Note: Don’t attempt to use raw dd commands to write the images. Too many silly things can go wrong that are checked for/fixed by the recommended programs. Do yourself a big favor and use one of the recommends to avoid spending a ton of time troubleshooting basic imaging problems!
Preparing SSD
We are going to burn a second identical copy of Raspbian to the SSD. This ensures everything the Pi needs to boot is there so we can use the SD card as a bootloader but our actual system will be on our nice fast SSD drive.
Note: Make sure you create the empty file named “ssh” on the boot partition of both drives if you are headless or don’t have a mouse/keyboard attached so you can ssh in on the first boot.
First Boot (SD card only, SSD unplugged)
Insert your freshly imaged SD card into the Pi and connect the power. Sign into the Pi for the first time.
Don’t do an apt-get upgrade/dist-upgrade or any additional configuration yet. Just stick with the instructions until we have finished configuration (especially since if something goes wrong you may have to start over and any other setup you did will be lost).
Once the Pi has finished booting and you have signed in for the first time plug in your SSD to your Pi’s USB 3.0 ports. The USB 3.0 ports are the ones that have the blue plastic inside instead of the black plastic (the black ones are USB 2.0 ports).
Change PARTUUID
We need to change the PARTUUID of our SSD’s partitions so the Pi doesn’t get confused about what device to boot from. Right now the partitions on both the SD card and the SSD are an exact match and we need them to be different so we can tell the Pi to boot specifically from our SSD’s partition.
We are going to use fdisk to change the SSD’s PARTUUID to the hexadecimal d34db33f to make our SSD easy to identify. Use the following:
$ sudo fdisk /dev/sda
Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.33.1).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sda: 238.5 GiB, 256060514304 bytes, 500118192 sectors
Disk model: ASM105x
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x6c586e13
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 8192 532479 524288 256M c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2 532480 500118191 499585712 238.2G 83 Linux
Command (m for help): x
Expert command (m for help): i
Enter the new disk identifier: 0xd34db33f
Disk identifier changed from 0x6c586e13 to 0xd34db33f.
Expert command (m for help): r
Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered.
Syncing disks.
Your /dev/mmcblk0 and /dev/sda devices should now be different from each other. The SD card’s ID is 6c586e13 and the SSD’s PARTUUID is now
Update /boot/cmdline.txt
We are going to change cmdline.txt to point to the SSD for booting instead of the SD card. First make a backup of your existing cmdline.txt file with the following command:
sudo cp /boot/cmdline.txt /boot/cmdline.txt.bak
We’ve now created a backup you can restore if something goes wrong. If you need to restore your backup plug the SD card into a computer/device and replace cmdline.txt with cmdline.txt.bak that we made above. Now your Pi should boot normally again.
Open up /boot/cmdline.txt using nano or your favorite text editor:
Make the change and double check the line is what it should be,then press Ctrl+X to save our changes.
Note: cmdline.txt should be one long solid line with no breaks — don’t add any line breaks or the system won’t boot and you’ll need to restore the backup we made earlier!
Test SSD
We are now ready to test booting from the SSD. Restart your Pi by issuing a
sudo reboot
The first boot with your SSD can be slow due to running fsck on the drive. If you have a really large SSD it can take surprisingly long to check all that space. Once the check completes it will mark the drive clean and skip the disk check from now on. It can take over a minute or two sometimes for really big drives so give it at least that much time before assuming it didn’t work.
After signing in we can verify that the SSD is being used like this:
$ findmnt -n -o SOURCE /
/dev/sda2
Verify that partition has switched over as shown below to /dev/sda2 (SSD) instead of /dev/mmcblk0p2 (SD card).
Update /etc/fstab
We are now ready to edit the /etc/fstab file to point to our updated drive. To edit the file type:
We want to change the root ( / ) partition (PARTUUID ending with -02) to load our SSD’s PARTUUID instead of the SD card. Replace the 2nd partition’s PARTUUID field on the last line in the file with the d34db33f label we applied earlier with fdisk. After making the change my /etc/fstab file looks like this:
Press Ctrl+X to tell nano to save our changes. Now type sudo reboot to restart the Pi.
Note: We want to leave the first partition (/boot) on the SD card. If you change this to the SSD then apt will update your SSD instead of the SD card so they won’t be used during boot! Remember that we are using the SD card as a bootloader and that is why the firmware updates (such as start.elf, etc) should go there instead of the SSD’s boot partition (which is never used).
Resizing Filesystem
By default the partition on the SSD / Flash drive will only be 1.8G. The Pi expands this automatically on micro SD drives but we will need to do it ourselves for a SSD / Flash drive. To do this we need to expand the partition and then resize the file system.
First let’s open fdisk and print the partitions:
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo fdisk /dev/sda
Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.33.1).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sda: 238.5 GiB, 256060514304 bytes, 500118192 sectors
Disk model: ASM105x
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xd34db33f
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 8192 532479 524288 256M c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2 532480 4390911 3858432 1.9G 83 Linux
There is the line we need. Our start value for /dev/sda2 (rootfs) is 532480. Next we need to remove and recreate the partition as a larger size.
If you make any mistakes during this command just close fdisk by pressing q. The changes won’t be written to disk. If you mess up any of the commands the drive will no longer boot and you’ll have to start over again so be careful!
Command (m for help): d
Partition number (1,2, default 2): 2
Partition 2 has been deleted.
Command (m for help): n
Partition type
p primary (1 primary, 0 extended, 3 free)
e extended (container for logical partitions)
Select (default p): p
Partition number (2-4, default 2): 2
First sector (2048-500118191, default 2048): 532480
Last sector, +/-sectors or +/-size{K,M,G,T,P} (532480-500118191, default 500118191): 500118191
Created a new partition 2 of type 'Linux' and of size 238.2 GiB.
Partition #2 contains a ext4 signature.
Do you want to remove the signature? [Y]es/[N]o: N
Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered.
Syncing disks.
If everything went well then type “w” and press enter. Otherwise press “q” to quit and try again. Once you enter “w” the changes will be permanently written to disk!
Now reboot the system. Type “df -h” to view the current disk:
We can see our disk is still 1.8G even after resizing the partition. That’s because we still have one more step! We need to resize the filesystem to fill our new partition space. For this we will use “sudo resize2fs /dev/sda2”:
sudo resize2fs /dev/sda2
resize2fs 1.44.5 (15-Dec-2018)
Filesystem at /dev/sda2 is mounted on /; on-line resizing required
old_desc_blocks = 1, new_desc_blocks = 15
The filesystem on /dev/sda2 is now 62448214 (4k) blocks long.
And that’s it! You will now be using all of your space on your drive.
Verify SSD Functionality / 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!
Update Pi using apt
Now that we’ve updated fstab it is safe (and highly recommended) to update your Pi’s software. Type “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade” to update the system and firmware.
Your system will now be running completely from your USB drive! To verify this, run the command “findmnt -n -o SOURCE” / to ensure your root partition has switched over as shown below to /dev/sda2 instead of /dev/mmcblk0p2.
Conclusion
The Samsung 950 Pro NVMe drive in the featured picture scored a 9189 on the Raspberry Pi Storage Benchmark. The previous all-time record score on a Pi 3B+ was 3561. The performance gains are very real and very dramatic.
For me getting this performance is well worth having to waste a micro SD card just to be a bootloader. I am largely after the USB 3.0 bus and gigabit ethernet performance improvements and using this method I am able to achieve the performance I was after without waiting an indeterminate amount of time for the feature to be added back in!
Although there are ongoing compatibility issues and we lack the super easy native USB booting support we had before I’m more than willing to go through the growing pains to finally get rid that ancient USB 2.0 bus! Just make sure if you are planning to build a system you plan your adapters and parts accordingly.
Got Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS with a root filesystem on a WD My Passport SSD all working using your preinstall image, firmware, and kernel. The firmware is loaded on a small microSD card, with the partition mounted at /boot/firmware after boot. The major downside is that UAS is disabled in the device firmware so performance is meh. I’ve uploaded a benchmark. Thank you very much!
That’s awesome to hear Mike, thanks for letting us know how it went and for taking the benchmark!
Amit Bahree
5 years ago
I could not get this to work and would appreciate any guidance. I got a new raspberry Pi 4, and got the suggested ELUTENG 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0 cable and a Kingston SSD drive – now when I follow this, and on Step 7 when I reboot- I can see the pi boot up (have it attached to a monitor), but I see some error which goes by too fast. And the attached keyboard and mouse doesn’t work – I tried a wireless (via a USB dongle) and a wired one too.
So now the pi is booting from the SSD, but it isn’t configured – it is not on the network or has a IP and with either the keyboard or mouse not working, I can’t configure it. Any ideas on how to try and debug this and try and get it working? When I switch back the cmdline.txt from the backup then it works as expected.
The old cmdline.txt is: dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=3b3e03b5-02 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait quiet splash plymouth.ignore-serial-consoles
And the new one (not working) is: dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=3b18e43a-02 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait quiet splash plymouth.ignore-serial-consoles
The only difference is the PARTUUID as outlined in the steps. So the thing boots up, but then the usb keyb and mouse doesn’t work – it is just waiting there for me to hit next and continue to finish configuring.
Those look like old boot flags from Pi 3ish. Let’s try with the ones I’m using in my Ubuntu preinstalled 18.04.3 image and that most other working distros seem to be using.
First try this one: dwc_otg.fiq_fix_enable=2 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=3b18e43a-02 rootfstype=ext4 rootwait rootflags=noload net.ifnames=0
Next you can try this if the PARTUUID selector isn’t working: dwc_otg.fiq_fix_enable=2 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/sda2 rootfstype=ext4 rootwait rootflags=noload net.ifnames=0
I had 2 fails before and I am not sure what it was but it also disabled my keyboard. I followed then this guide more exactly plus I disabled wifi, bt and the hciuart service as one of the errors shown at boot pointed to this service. which prevented errors until now. Must say that I dont have tested much more until now, but this is on the todo list…
Thanks for the suggestions, but unfortunately, neither of them work and I get the same behavior. Boots up, can see it is booting from the drive but then get to the Welcome to Raspberry Pi screen and cannot configure or use keyb + mouse. And this is using the latest raspbian image, and not trying Ubuntu. Could there be anything in there?
Also, if it would help, here is the output of blkid (when it boots up from the SD card). I don’t know why for the SSD (rootfs partition), it says PPTYPE as dos.
This does help. The concerning thing to me is that the partition layout doesn’t match. /dev/mmcblk0 is the SD card and /dev/sda is the SSD. The SD card seems to be carrying an additional DOS PARTUUID that I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen before. If you download the Raspbian image and write it to both devices one after another the partition layout should match 100% (other than the PARTUUIDs, which is generated specifically to be unique for this reason)!
Raspbian is by far the easiest of all of them to get working on an SSD. Let’s try again with a simplified version of steps:
1. Download latest Raspbian (7-10-19 at this time)
2. Use Win32DiskImager/Etcher to write the image to both a SD card and the SSD at the time same
3. Put the Raspbian SD card in the Pi and boot normally. Do sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade then a sudo rpi-update to update everything to the latest firmware (including your boot SD card, important!)
4. Now plug the freshly imaged SSD — run lsblk and change /boot/cmdline.txt to the SSD partition 2, reboot
Don’t do any other steps for now like /etc/fstab, let’s worry about that later. Those 4 steps should be all it takes for you to get a complete boot into the Pi on the SSD.
That’s basically it. Honestly there isn’t a lot of room for things to go wrong. You are really only updating the firmware then changing the rootfs text entry in cmdline.txt. We don’t have to rebuild the kernel, change any kernel modules, anything like that. Things like driver issues, etc. should not be occurring. I think it has to be something weird at this point like an incomplete image, etc.
The reason we update the firmware first is that the /boot on the SD card will not have any of the latest patches and the Raspberry Pi 4 has a change where it actually has onboard firmware instead of loading it from the SD card like all older Pis.
I’ll be very interested to see what you find out. It has to be something silly in the early steps where something went wrong I think! It could also be something with the adapter, the SSD, etc. but since those are both known working devices this is definitely a strange case! You can also try plugging in your SSD into one of the black ports instead of the blue ones just to test.
James,
Firstly I appreciate your help and patience with me – as a fellow geek (albeit not very knowledgeable in the boot loader on Linux), I am thankful.
So I did a complete fresh install – checked the image was the latest and imaged both the SD card and the SSD drives. The only difference wsa that I also ran sudo rpi-update, to update the firmware. The steps in your blog post don’t outline that specific step -I don’t know if that was by design or a ‘bug’.
Irrespective the outcome hasn’t changed. When I changed the PARTUUID, it boots up and I can see the desktop, but then keyb and mouse not working.
And for reference below is the output from blkid and all I did was change the “25789520-02” to “3b18e43a-02”.
I am happy to try and debug this if it helps you and others. And finally, as a reference, when I had tried this method in the past, that had worked – but I hadn’t checked enough to make sure. I can try that again and see if that is accurate using: findmnt -n -o SOURCE /
I am having the same issue. It worked fine with the same SD card and SSD in August. I tried it today with the same “2019-07-10-raspbian-buster.img”. It boots with SSD but the mouse and keyboard are not working.
Louis, quick question – did you also upgrade the firmware when you ran this in the end – i.e did you run rpi-update or only apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade?
Same issue with me. SD card boot and SSD/USB rootfs.
Initial Buster image worked, but as soon as I update, no usb keyboard or mouse functions. Did anyone found a solution yet.
I dont know if it is “the” solution, but when I delayed “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade” from step 3, to after step 9 my mouse and keyboard is working fine. I tried this with both Raspbian Buster Lite and Raspbian Buster with desktop and recommended software
A few other people encountered this as well. I have updated the instructions to put the update step at the very end (now step 10).
Alex
5 years ago
Anyone got this working on Hassos image for Home Assistant https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system I can follow the guide but the cmdline.txt is in /mnt/boot/cmdline.txt and when i edit it per instructions and reboot it still mounts /dev/mmcblk0p3 and not the USB drive
Thanks for the help!
Denny Fox
5 years ago
I ran across this posting with a work-around for misbehaving USB3 adapters on the Raspberry Pi 4B:
I have four different adapters: Sabrent enclosure, Sabrent cable, ELUTENG enclosure, and Startech cable. The only adapter that would boot and run without the quirk fix in /boot/cmdlime.txt was the Startech cable. This confirms the information in the article above.
When I applied the usb-storage.quirks= fix to /boot/cmdline.txt, all adapters functioned well. Interestingly the StarTech cable turned in better performance with the quirk fix in place than without it. I am using fio with the commands from the link above for testing.
Hopefully we will get improvements in the Raspberry Pi 4 firmware including booting directly from USB as time goes on. Until then it looks like the quirk fix is useful.
Francois Gervais
5 years ago
As a reference, I get a 5x sequencial write speed upgrade:
sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/testfile bs=1M count=1000
dd: error writing '/dev/testfile': No space left on device
841+0 records in
840+0 records out
881577984 bytes (882 MB, 841 MiB) copied, 32.809 s, 26.9 MB/s
Using RIITOP NVMe USB Adapter + SN750 250GB:
sudo dd if=/dev/testfile of=testfile bs=1M conv=fsync
840+1 records in
840+1 records out
881577984 bytes (882 MB, 841 MiB) copied, 4.6014 s, 192 MB/s
sudo dd if=/dev/testfile of=testfile bs=1M conv=fsync
840+1 records in
840+1 records out
881577984 bytes (882 MB, 841 MiB) copied, 23.7579 s, 37.1 MB/s
olivier
5 years ago
Hello,
nice work, i succeed to run my Pi4 with my Crucial Bx500 and the ELUTENG adaptator cable, but its very slow to start until the desktop is ok.
When i said very slow, its between 5 and 10 minutes…lol
Is there something i can check?
When i am on the desktop, its fine, i have install hassio in docker, it works, just a problem to load my last snapshot from a hassos config on rpi3 whithout docker.
I tried ist also with a Crucial Bx500 SSD, everything fine as long as ist plugged to USB 2 on USB 3 it sometimes dont even start. Doing the same with an older Seagate Maxtor normal HDD much faster and no Problems on USB 3. So It is more likely a problem with the SSD than with the SATA/USB cable.
Tom
5 years ago
I bought the recommended “StarTech.com 2.5″ SATA to USB Cable” to connect a 128 GB Intel 545s to my Raspberry 4. However, I’m quite disappointed by the low performance:
root@raspberrypi4:~# sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches; dd if=/dev/zero of=~/test bs=8k count=500k conv=fsync; sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches; dd if=~/test of=/dev/null bs=8k count=500k
512000+0 records in
512000+0 records out
4194304000 bytes (4.2 GB, 3.9 GiB) copied, 42.1646 s, 99.5 MB/s
512000+0 records in
512000+0 records out
4194304000 bytes (4.2 GB, 3.9 GiB) copied, 43.73 s, 95.9 MB/s
root@raspberrypi4:~# lsusb
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 1f75:0621 Innostor Technology Corporation
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
Also tried to set usb-storage.quirks in /boot/cmdline.txt, but although it’s active, it does not speed up things;
[ 1.271661] usb 2-2: new SuperSpeed Gen 1 USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
[ 1.303041] usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1f75, idProduct=0621, bcdDevice= 0.36
[ 1.303071] usb 2-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=4, Product=5, SerialNumber=6
[ 1.303094] usb 2-2: SerialNumber: 20190803
[ 1.306134] usb-storage 2-2:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[ 1.306474] usb-storage 2-2:1.0: Quirks match for vid 1f75 pid 0621: 800000
[ 1.306590] scsi host0: usb-storage 2-2:1.0
[ 2.312553] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access INTEL SS DSC2KW128G8 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[ 2.313656] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 250069680 512-byte logical blocks: (128 GB/119 GiB)
[ 2.314576] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[ 2.314601] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 3b 00 00 00
[ 2.315574] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] No Caching mode page found
[ 2.315599] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 2.319398] sda: sda1 sda2
[ 2.322897] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk
So what’s wrong here? Is it a problem with the SSD, or is it some problem related to the adapter?
Have you ran my storage benchmark on that drive yet? It looks like the DD write speed on this drive is pretty underwhelming although Intel’s description of this drive is an enterprise level storage that focuses on reliability in an a enterprise level data center rather than high performance. This SSD will probably last decades but the performance on it will never be a head turner as that isn’t what it was made for.
If you go to Pi Benchmarks let the table load and then sort descending by DD write speed. Once we get down to the 100s we can see your drive (based only on DD speed which is a poor measure of performance) falls in the performance range of something like a Samsung 750 Evo. You’ll also notice that the DD write speed is only a small part of the score as devices in this range can test thousands of points apart when we calculate 4k blocksize and random read/random write scores.
I do have good news for you though. Intel states this drive is supposed to be above average for small blocksize I/O which is *exactly* what a Pi using it as the operating system drive needs. I would take my storage benchmark on that drive and let us know your total score. The benchmark won’t recognize the drive automatically because it is a pretty uncommon one but it will still score it normally and we may be surprised at the results if Intel is telling the truth about their focus on small blocksize random I/O!
thanks for your detailed answer. Here are the results of the benchmark:
Category Test Result
HDParm Disk Read 76.20 MB/s
HDParm Cached Disk Read 73.52 MB/s
DD Disk Write 92.6 MB/s
FIO 4k random read 4890 IOPS (19562 KB/s)
FIO 4k random write 6668 IOPS (26673 KB/s)
IOZone 4k read 18739 KB/s
IOZone 4k write 15216 KB/s
IOZone 4k random read 14683 KB/s
IOZone 4k random write 17996 KB/s
Score: 4537
Probably better than a micro SD card, but not outstanding…
The main reason why I bought this drive are reliability and durability – however, before buying it, I also looked for a “good” performance, and according to benchmarks I found on the web, it seemed as if this drive would perform quite good.
As the system did not yet go into productional use – is there any rather cheap, more powerful SSD you would prefer over the Intel 545s, keeping in mind reliability and durability are rather important for my use case?
thanks for your reply, but that’s not the problem, /dev/zero is fast enough – when using the approach you suggested, the dd write speed slightly increased from 99.5 to 100 MB/s (copying from /dev/zero to /dev/test ran at 472 MB/s).
Got Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS with a root filesystem on a WD My Passport SSD all working using your preinstall image, firmware, and kernel. The firmware is loaded on a small microSD card, with the partition mounted at /boot/firmware after boot. The major downside is that UAS is disabled in the device firmware so performance is meh. I’ve uploaded a benchmark. Thank you very much!
That’s awesome to hear Mike, thanks for letting us know how it went and for taking the benchmark!
I could not get this to work and would appreciate any guidance. I got a new raspberry Pi 4, and got the suggested ELUTENG 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0 cable and a Kingston SSD drive – now when I follow this, and on Step 7 when I reboot- I can see the pi boot up (have it attached to a monitor), but I see some error which goes by too fast. And the attached keyboard and mouse doesn’t work – I tried a wireless (via a USB dongle) and a wired one too.
So now the pi is booting from the SSD, but it isn’t configured – it is not on the network or has a IP and with either the keyboard or mouse not working, I can’t configure it. Any ideas on how to try and debug this and try and get it working? When I switch back the cmdline.txt from the backup then it works as expected.
Thanks,
Amit.
Hey Amit,
It sounds like you’ve narrowed the problem down to cmdline.txt. Can you tell us what your new and old cmdline.txt is?
Thanks Ja,es.
The old cmdline.txt is:
dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=3b3e03b5-02 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait quiet splash plymouth.ignore-serial-consolesAnd the new one (not working) is:
dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=3b18e43a-02 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait quiet splash plymouth.ignore-serial-consolesThe only difference is the PARTUUID as outlined in the steps. So the thing boots up, but then the usb keyb and mouse doesn’t work – it is just waiting there for me to hit next and continue to finish configuring.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Amit.
Those look like old boot flags from Pi 3ish. Let’s try with the ones I’m using in my Ubuntu preinstalled 18.04.3 image and that most other working distros seem to be using.
First try this one:
dwc_otg.fiq_fix_enable=2 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=3b18e43a-02 rootfstype=ext4 rootwait rootflags=noload net.ifnames=0Next you can try this if the PARTUUID selector isn’t working:
dwc_otg.fiq_fix_enable=2 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/sda2 rootfstype=ext4 rootwait rootflags=noload net.ifnames=0Did this help?
I had 2 fails before and I am not sure what it was but it also disabled my keyboard. I followed then this guide more exactly plus I disabled wifi, bt and the hciuart service as one of the errors shown at boot pointed to this service. which prevented errors until now. Must say that I dont have tested much more until now, but this is on the todo list…
Greetings
Thanks for the suggestions, but unfortunately, neither of them work and I get the same behavior. Boots up, can see it is booting from the drive but then get to the Welcome to Raspberry Pi screen and cannot configure or use keyb + mouse. And this is using the latest raspbian image, and not trying Ubuntu. Could there be anything in there?
Thanks.
Also, if it would help, here is the output of blkid (when it boots up from the SD card). I don’t know why for the SSD (rootfs partition), it says PPTYPE as dos.
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo blkid/dev/mmcblk0p1: LABEL_FATBOOT="boot" LABEL="boot" UUID="0C61-73F5" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="3b3e03b5-01"
/dev/mmcblk0p2: LABEL="rootfs" UUID="43f2d0bb-83be-464f-94d0-9a751f376c64" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="3b3e03b5-02"
/dev/sda1: LABEL_FATBOOT="boot" LABEL="boot" UUID="0C61-73F5" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="3b18e43a-01"
/dev/sda2: LABEL="rootfs" UUID="43f2d0bb-83be-464f-94d0-9a751f376c64" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="3b18e43a-02"
/dev/mmcblk0: PTUUID="3b3e03b5" PTTYPE="dos"
Thanks.
Hey Amit,
This does help. The concerning thing to me is that the partition layout doesn’t match. /dev/mmcblk0 is the SD card and /dev/sda is the SSD. The SD card seems to be carrying an additional DOS PARTUUID that I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen before. If you download the Raspbian image and write it to both devices one after another the partition layout should match 100% (other than the PARTUUIDs, which is generated specifically to be unique for this reason)!
Raspbian is by far the easiest of all of them to get working on an SSD. Let’s try again with a simplified version of steps:
1. Download latest Raspbian (7-10-19 at this time)
2. Use Win32DiskImager/Etcher to write the image to both a SD card and the SSD at the time same
3. Put the Raspbian SD card in the Pi and boot normally. Do sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade then a sudo rpi-update to update everything to the latest firmware (including your boot SD card, important!)
4. Now plug the freshly imaged SSD — run lsblk and change /boot/cmdline.txt to the SSD partition 2, reboot
Don’t do any other steps for now like /etc/fstab, let’s worry about that later. Those 4 steps should be all it takes for you to get a complete boot into the Pi on the SSD.
That’s basically it. Honestly there isn’t a lot of room for things to go wrong. You are really only updating the firmware then changing the rootfs text entry in cmdline.txt. We don’t have to rebuild the kernel, change any kernel modules, anything like that. Things like driver issues, etc. should not be occurring. I think it has to be something weird at this point like an incomplete image, etc.
The reason we update the firmware first is that the /boot on the SD card will not have any of the latest patches and the Raspberry Pi 4 has a change where it actually has onboard firmware instead of loading it from the SD card like all older Pis.
I’ll be very interested to see what you find out. It has to be something silly in the early steps where something went wrong I think! It could also be something with the adapter, the SSD, etc. but since those are both known working devices this is definitely a strange case! You can also try plugging in your SSD into one of the black ports instead of the blue ones just to test.
James,
Firstly I appreciate your help and patience with me – as a fellow geek (albeit not very knowledgeable in the boot loader on Linux), I am thankful.
So I did a complete fresh install – checked the image was the latest and imaged both the SD card and the SSD drives. The only difference wsa that I also ran sudo rpi-update, to update the firmware. The steps in your blog post don’t outline that specific step -I don’t know if that was by design or a ‘bug’.
Irrespective the outcome hasn’t changed. When I changed the PARTUUID, it boots up and I can see the desktop, but then keyb and mouse not working.
And for reference below is the output from blkid and all I did was change the “25789520-02” to “3b18e43a-02”.
I am happy to try and debug this if it helps you and others. And finally, as a reference, when I had tried this method in the past, that had worked – but I hadn’t checked enough to make sure. I can try that again and see if that is accurate using: findmnt -n -o SOURCE /
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo blkid/dev/mmcblk0p1: LABEL_FATBOOT="boot" LABEL="boot" UUID="0C61-73F5" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="25789520-01"
/dev/mmcblk0p2: LABEL="rootfs" UUID="43f2d0bb-83be-464f-94d0-9a751f376c64" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="25789520-02"
/dev/mmcblk0: PTUUID="25789520" PTTYPE="dos"
/dev/sda1: LABEL_FATBOOT="boot" LABEL="boot" UUID="0C61-73F5" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="3b18e43a-01"
/dev/sda2: LABEL="rootfs" UUID="43f2d0bb-83be-464f-94d0-9a751f376c64" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="3b18e43a-02"
Thanks,
Amit.
I am having the same issue. It worked fine with the same SD card and SSD in August. I tried it today with the same “2019-07-10-raspbian-buster.img”. It boots with SSD but the mouse and keyboard are not working.
I had exactly the same problem on X855 mSATA adapter, booting fine but then USB mouse and keyboard would not work.
Solution was to not do the system update until the very end. Now working perfectly.
Louis, quick question – did you also upgrade the firmware when you ran this in the end – i.e did you run rpi-update or only apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade?
Thanks.
Same issue with me. SD card boot and SSD/USB rootfs.
Initial Buster image worked, but as soon as I update, no usb keyboard or mouse functions. Did anyone found a solution yet.
I have reached the exact same stage. No mouse or keyboard functions. Help? waiting for some solution.
I dont know if it is “the” solution, but when I delayed “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade” from step 3, to after step 9 my mouse and keyboard is working fine. I tried this with both Raspbian Buster Lite and Raspbian Buster with desktop and recommended software
Hey Louis,
A few other people encountered this as well. I have updated the instructions to put the update step at the very end (now step 10).
Anyone got this working on Hassos image for Home Assistant https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system I can follow the guide but the cmdline.txt is in /mnt/boot/cmdline.txt and when i edit it per instructions and reboot it still mounts /dev/mmcblk0p3 and not the USB drive
Thanks for the help!
I ran across this posting with a work-around for misbehaving USB3 adapters on the Raspberry Pi 4B:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=245931#p1501426
STICKY: If you have a Raspberry Pi 4 and are getting bad speeds transferring data to/from USB3.0 SSDs, read this
I have four different adapters: Sabrent enclosure, Sabrent cable, ELUTENG enclosure, and Startech cable. The only adapter that would boot and run without the quirk fix in /boot/cmdlime.txt was the Startech cable. This confirms the information in the article above.
When I applied the usb-storage.quirks= fix to /boot/cmdline.txt, all adapters functioned well. Interestingly the StarTech cable turned in better performance with the quirk fix in place than without it. I am using fio with the commands from the link above for testing.
w/o with
Startech Cable sequential-read 69.8 159
174c:55aa sequential-write 79.9 211
random4k-read 13.9 13.8
mixedrandom4k-read-write 3.9 3.4
random4k-read-4processes 40.3 11.1
The quirk fix disables UAS support and reverts to mass storage for USB3.
Here is my /boot/cmdline.txt for reference:
# SD Card
dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=0cd3cae7-02 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait# SSH on sda1 – no quirk
#dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/sda1 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait# Startech Cable
#usb-storage.quirks=174c:55aa:u dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/sda1 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait# Sabrent Enclosure
#usb-storage.quirks=152d:1561:u dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/sda1 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait# ELUTENG Enclosure
#usb-storage.quirks=152d:0578:u dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/sda1 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait# Sabrent Cable
#usb-storage.quirks=152d:1561:u dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/sda1 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwaitOnly one line may be uncommented for each case.
Hopefully we will get improvements in the Raspberry Pi 4 firmware including booting directly from USB as time goes on. Until then it looks like the quirk fix is useful.
As a reference, I get a 5x sequencial write speed upgrade:
sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/testfile bs=1M count=1000dd: error writing '/dev/testfile': No space left on device
841+0 records in
840+0 records out
881577984 bytes (882 MB, 841 MiB) copied, 32.809 s, 26.9 MB/s
Using RIITOP NVMe USB Adapter + SN750 250GB:
sudo dd if=/dev/testfile of=testfile bs=1M conv=fsync840+1 records in
840+1 records out
881577984 bytes (882 MB, 841 MiB) copied, 4.6014 s, 192 MB/s
Using Samsung PRO Endurance 32GB:
sudo dd if=/dev/testfile of=testfile bs=1M conv=fsync840+1 records in
840+1 records out
881577984 bytes (882 MB, 841 MiB) copied, 23.7579 s, 37.1 MB/s
Hello,
nice work, i succeed to run my Pi4 with my Crucial Bx500 and the ELUTENG adaptator cable, but its very slow to start until the desktop is ok.
When i said very slow, its between 5 and 10 minutes…lol
Is there something i can check?
When i am on the desktop, its fine, i have install hassio in docker, it works, just a problem to load my last snapshot from a hassos config on rpi3 whithout docker.
Thanks!
Olivier
I tried ist also with a Crucial Bx500 SSD, everything fine as long as ist plugged to USB 2 on USB 3 it sometimes dont even start. Doing the same with an older Seagate Maxtor normal HDD much faster and no Problems on USB 3. So It is more likely a problem with the SSD than with the SATA/USB cable.
I bought the recommended “StarTech.com 2.5″ SATA to USB Cable” to connect a 128 GB Intel 545s to my Raspberry 4. However, I’m quite disappointed by the low performance:
root@raspberrypi4:~# sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches; dd if=/dev/zero of=~/test bs=8k count=500k conv=fsync; sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches; dd if=~/test of=/dev/null bs=8k count=500k512000+0 records in
512000+0 records out
4194304000 bytes (4.2 GB, 3.9 GiB) copied, 42.1646 s, 99.5 MB/s
512000+0 records in
512000+0 records out
4194304000 bytes (4.2 GB, 3.9 GiB) copied, 43.73 s, 95.9 MB/s
root@raspberrypi4:~# lsusb
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 1f75:0621 Innostor Technology Corporation
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
Also tried to set usb-storage.quirks in /boot/cmdline.txt, but although it’s active, it does not speed up things;
[ 1.271661] usb 2-2: new SuperSpeed Gen 1 USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd[ 1.303041] usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1f75, idProduct=0621, bcdDevice= 0.36
[ 1.303071] usb 2-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=4, Product=5, SerialNumber=6
[ 1.303094] usb 2-2: SerialNumber: 20190803
[ 1.306134] usb-storage 2-2:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[ 1.306474] usb-storage 2-2:1.0: Quirks match for vid 1f75 pid 0621: 800000
[ 1.306590] scsi host0: usb-storage 2-2:1.0
[ 2.312553] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access INTEL SS DSC2KW128G8 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[ 2.313656] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 250069680 512-byte logical blocks: (128 GB/119 GiB)
[ 2.314576] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[ 2.314601] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 3b 00 00 00
[ 2.315574] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] No Caching mode page found
[ 2.315599] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 2.319398] sda: sda1 sda2
[ 2.322897] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk
So what’s wrong here? Is it a problem with the SSD, or is it some problem related to the adapter?
Hey Tom,
Have you ran my storage benchmark on that drive yet? It looks like the DD write speed on this drive is pretty underwhelming although Intel’s description of this drive is an enterprise level storage that focuses on reliability in an a enterprise level data center rather than high performance. This SSD will probably last decades but the performance on it will never be a head turner as that isn’t what it was made for.
If you go to Pi Benchmarks let the table load and then sort descending by DD write speed. Once we get down to the 100s we can see your drive (based only on DD speed which is a poor measure of performance) falls in the performance range of something like a Samsung 750 Evo. You’ll also notice that the DD write speed is only a small part of the score as devices in this range can test thousands of points apart when we calculate 4k blocksize and random read/random write scores.
I do have good news for you though. Intel states this drive is supposed to be above average for small blocksize I/O which is *exactly* what a Pi using it as the operating system drive needs. I would take my storage benchmark on that drive and let us know your total score. The benchmark won’t recognize the drive automatically because it is a pretty uncommon one but it will still score it normally and we may be surprised at the results if Intel is telling the truth about their focus on small blocksize random I/O!
Hi James,
thanks for your detailed answer. Here are the results of the benchmark:
Category Test ResultHDParm Disk Read 76.20 MB/s
HDParm Cached Disk Read 73.52 MB/s
DD Disk Write 92.6 MB/s
FIO 4k random read 4890 IOPS (19562 KB/s)
FIO 4k random write 6668 IOPS (26673 KB/s)
IOZone 4k read 18739 KB/s
IOZone 4k write 15216 KB/s
IOZone 4k random read 14683 KB/s
IOZone 4k random write 17996 KB/s
Score: 4537
Probably better than a micro SD card, but not outstanding…
The main reason why I bought this drive are reliability and durability – however, before buying it, I also looked for a “good” performance, and according to benchmarks I found on the web, it seemed as if this drive would perform quite good.
As the system did not yet go into productional use – is there any rather cheap, more powerful SSD you would prefer over the Intel 545s, keeping in mind reliability and durability are rather important for my use case?
The kernel might not be fast enough to feed the drive. I would make a file in ram first.
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/testfile bs=1M count=500
Then use testfile to feed the dd to ~/test.
Hi Francois,
thanks for your reply, but that’s not the problem, /dev/zero is fast enough – when using the approach you suggested, the dd write speed slightly increased from 99.5 to 100 MB/s (copying from /dev/zero to /dev/test ran at 472 MB/s).