**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.
Wow, I haven’t seen that one before. Looks good! I didn’t spot any updates for that one available yet on the ICY BOX Product download page but we may see some updates some day.
It looks like the original ICY BOX at least has a firmware update already but all it says it does is enable the “Samsung Data Migration Assistant” which does not sound very helpful for our purposes. Thanks for your report!
A von Roznowski
2 years ago
In case it is not known, yet: the following sabrent adapter doesn’t work (anymore ?) with Pi 4. Specifically, bootloader doesn’t recognize the disk. Reboot with the adapter attached also fails. Hotplug after boot works.
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 152d:1561 JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technology Corp. JMS561U two ports SATA 6Gb/s bridge
Welcome! Yes, we have definitely seen some issues with that chipset before. If this is a Sabrent adapter though you may have some options here.
We’ve tried to use this firmware on non-Sabrent adapters before and often it wouldn’t change anything or it would make it worse but if it’s actually a Sabrent adapter you could safely apply the firmware updates. We have had people in the comments get them going before with the firmware updates from Sabrent.
Definitely watch out for the power requirements as well. USB 2.0 can’t carry as much power as USB 3.0 and I noticed your log output does have USB 2.0 listed. This can often mean the drive connected needs more power than the Pi can provide over USB. If you happen to have a powered USB hub at your home/work this is really easy to test to make sure it’s not something like getting enough power. In the past when people have been able to get it into USB 2.0 mode and not USB 3.0 the answer usually ends up being there was enough power to hit the USB 2.0 power limit but not the USB 3.0 power limit which is why it won’t function in 3.0 mode.
Being able to plug in the drive and use it when it’s also booted up (but failing to boot on it’s own) is also often a sign of this. You’ll often notice it works very slow when connected this way if it’s powered related. There may be a several second delay sometimes just cd’ing to folders or doing a ls which means it’s definitely functioning on lower power mode (but can’t boot in this mode). If you have both of these symptoms it’s almost certainly power related.
For example, my Samsung 960 EVO 256GB NVMe drive can be powered over USB 3.0 normally and functions 100%. If I put in the Samsung 960 EVO 1GB version it won’t even boot. Why? Because the 1TB requires more power than the 256GB module. Substantially more. When I connect that same 1TB drive with a powered USB hub it works as perfectly as the 256GB version. It’s the same with USB to SATA drives. If you try to plug in a 10 year old HDD it almost certainly won’t be able to be powered without a powered USB hub and people have done this before. Those are just some rough examples to illustrate with. It depends a lot on the drive itself.
A lot of the popular ones like EC-SSHD the popular ones definitely work better with the firmware updates applied. It often fixes things like TRIM support for SSDs and will often also fix UASP driver/firmware issues which improves performance. Hopefully that helps!
Kokec
2 years ago
I tried multiple connectors. Some generic USB to sata weren’t working.
At last, I found this one to be working correctly (also previously confirmed to be working by Micro in the comments):
Thanks, that definitely looks about right. I know the only chance with the Transparent one working is getting the USB 3.1 version and I believe it specifically needs to be the 10G version (and not the 6G). The UGREEN looks great. Thanks again!
Anders P
3 years ago
Thank you for making this page and writing information about this topic!
I now have my cheap JMicron 578-based USB3-SATA-adapter working in
the USB3-port without using quirks on my Pi4. In the beginning it was unusable, but
now, after going through the steps of switching to an USB2-port, using quirks,
upgrading the firmware of the controller and finally going back to USB3 and
no quirks, I’m getting great results with a score of 7449 using your benchmark tool
compared with the score of 2553 with USB2. I encourage other with the same chipset
to look at your tips for upgrading the firmware of the adapter.
A few details for other with the same equipment:
From lsusb Bus 002 Device 002: ID 152d:0578 JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technology Corp. JMS578 SATA 6Gb/s
From dmesg: [ 1469.403369] usb 1-1.3: new high-speed USB device number 5 using xhci_hcd
[ 1469.614649] usb 1-1.3: New USB device found, idVendor=152d, idProduct=0578, bcdDevice=32.02
[ 1469.614671] usb 1-1.3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 1469.614689] usb 1-1.3: Product: JMS579
[ 1469.614706] usb 1-1.3: Manufacturer: JMicron
Excellent results, thanks for sharing! 7449 is a huge jump from 2553 so that was definitely worth your while. I would second your recommendation for others with the same chipset to update. Take care!
Terje Moe
3 years ago
Hello
Thank you for a great article.
I’ve got one question, maybe a bit on the side, but do you think a setup with the Kingston A400 and a Startech usb 3.0 adapter will work with a img from LinuxCNC. I will be running an CNC router from the pi4 4 gb.
I’m actually not familiar with that distro. It looks like maybe it’s possible as I found a guide here. It sounds like USB booting works with it according to that guide. The drive and adapter hardware should be fine and those are both known to work. Best of luck and let us know how it turns out!
Fabio
3 years ago
Hi there,
I’ve tested a aplic M.2 NGFF adapter with my RPi 4 (Home Assistant OS). Partitioning is OK, but I can boot or use it with the data partition only on USB 2.0 ports. No luck with 3.0.
Thanks for the information! This is a tricky one. Normally with 2.5″ SATA adapters this is a firmware issue but not with M.2 NGFF. Those don’t have known compatibility issues really with the Pi in the same way as 2.5″ SATA.
They do have power issues though on USB 3.0 (USB 2.0 limits the amount of power provided so it will boot but it will perform very slowly). A powered USB hub should let you use it on the USB 3.0 ports effectively!
Any powered USB hub would work for sure for a test (I don’t think the Sabrent adapter I usually recommend is available on amazon.it that I could find on there but it’s likely because we have a different style wall socket connector here). Hopefully that helps!
tah18
3 years ago
Can you point me to any resources that will help me create and use multiple boot partitions on a single USB SSD? Can the Pi 4 B allow me to select a boot partition on a USB SSD on startup? I would like to use a Kingston A440S 240 GB SSD to experiment with 32-bit and 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS versions, Ubuntu, a Raspberry Pi OS lite for a Minecraft server, or others etc.. Is this even possible? Thanks!
It’s been a while since this came up but I do have a couple of resources for you. The only way I’ve ever heard of doing this is using BerryBoot. The good news is that it works on just about every Pi including the Pi 4 / Pi 400.
Thanks for the prompt reply and helpful info. I have started looking into BerryBoot, and have also come across something called PINN. The latter seems to address the same issue. Not sure if either/both are up to date. Will do some digging. Thanks again!
No problem at all! I have not heard of PINN yet but definitely let us know if you try and it and it works well, I’m always on the look out for cool/handy new utilities!
BerryBoot should be up to date as they added Pi 400 support. The Pi 400 was released in October of 2020 so it is not even a year old and is the latest compatibility changes that would have came up with the Pi. Nothing else has been done in the Pi that is newer than the Pi 400 so BerryBoot is definitely as up to date as I think it’s going to get. Best of luck and let us know how it turns out!
ICY BOX RAID Gehäuse für 2x 2,5 Zoll SSD
Crucial MX500 1TB CT1000MX500SSD1
Hello, I now run a raspi system with this raid Case from Icy Box. I use usb-storage.quirks=1234:5678:u <- yes, it is this numbers combination
Hey Gregor,
Wow, I haven’t seen that one before. Looks good! I didn’t spot any updates for that one available yet on the ICY BOX Product download page but we may see some updates some day.
It looks like the original ICY BOX at least has a firmware update already but all it says it does is enable the “Samsung Data Migration Assistant” which does not sound very helpful for our purposes. Thanks for your report!
In case it is not known, yet: the following sabrent adapter doesn’t work (anymore ?) with Pi 4. Specifically, bootloader doesn’t recognize the disk. Reboot with the adapter attached also fails. Hotplug after boot works.
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hubBus 002 Device 002: ID 152d:1561 JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technology Corp. JMS561U two ports SATA 6Gb/s bridge
Hey A von Roznowski,
Welcome! Yes, we have definitely seen some issues with that chipset before. If this is a Sabrent adapter though you may have some options here.
We’ve tried to use this firmware on non-Sabrent adapters before and often it wouldn’t change anything or it would make it worse but if it’s actually a Sabrent adapter you could safely apply the firmware updates. We have had people in the comments get them going before with the firmware updates from Sabrent.
I wrote a guide more specific to fixing these here: Fixing Storage Adapters for Raspberry Pi via Firmware Updates. If you have a Sabrent adapter especially it’s definitely worth a try.
Definitely watch out for the power requirements as well. USB 2.0 can’t carry as much power as USB 3.0 and I noticed your log output does have USB 2.0 listed. This can often mean the drive connected needs more power than the Pi can provide over USB. If you happen to have a powered USB hub at your home/work this is really easy to test to make sure it’s not something like getting enough power. In the past when people have been able to get it into USB 2.0 mode and not USB 3.0 the answer usually ends up being there was enough power to hit the USB 2.0 power limit but not the USB 3.0 power limit which is why it won’t function in 3.0 mode.
Being able to plug in the drive and use it when it’s also booted up (but failing to boot on it’s own) is also often a sign of this. You’ll often notice it works very slow when connected this way if it’s powered related. There may be a several second delay sometimes just cd’ing to folders or doing a ls which means it’s definitely functioning on lower power mode (but can’t boot in this mode). If you have both of these symptoms it’s almost certainly power related.
For example, my Samsung 960 EVO 256GB NVMe drive can be powered over USB 3.0 normally and functions 100%. If I put in the Samsung 960 EVO 1GB version it won’t even boot. Why? Because the 1TB requires more power than the 256GB module. Substantially more. When I connect that same 1TB drive with a powered USB hub it works as perfectly as the 256GB version. It’s the same with USB to SATA drives. If you try to plug in a 10 year old HDD it almost certainly won’t be able to be powered without a powered USB hub and people have done this before. Those are just some rough examples to illustrate with. It depends a lot on the drive itself.
A lot of the popular ones like EC-SSHD the popular ones definitely work better with the firmware updates applied. It often fixes things like TRIM support for SSDs and will often also fix UASP driver/firmware issues which improves performance. Hopefully that helps!
I tried multiple connectors. Some generic USB to sata weren’t working.
At last, I found this one to be working correctly (also previously confirmed to be working by Micro in the comments):
UGREEN 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0 Adapter Cable with UASP Converter*
This one caused me multiple problems:
ORICO 2.5″ SATA to USB C 3.0 Enclosure (Transparent)*
Thanks for all the work put in to this site, the script and best regards!
Hey Kokec,
Thanks, that definitely looks about right. I know the only chance with the Transparent one working is getting the USB 3.1 version and I believe it specifically needs to be the 10G version (and not the 6G). The UGREEN looks great. Thanks again!
Thank you for making this page and writing information about this topic!
I now have my cheap JMicron 578-based USB3-SATA-adapter working in
the USB3-port without using quirks on my Pi4. In the beginning it was unusable, but
now, after going through the steps of switching to an USB2-port, using quirks,
upgrading the firmware of the controller and finally going back to USB3 and
no quirks, I’m getting great results with a score of 7449 using your benchmark tool
compared with the score of 2553 with USB2. I encourage other with the same chipset
to look at your tips for upgrading the firmware of the adapter.
A few details for other with the same equipment:
From lsusb
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 152d:0578 JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technology Corp. JMS578 SATA 6Gb/sFrom dmesg:
[ 1469.403369] usb 1-1.3: new high-speed USB device number 5 using xhci_hcd[ 1469.614649] usb 1-1.3: New USB device found, idVendor=152d, idProduct=0578, bcdDevice=32.02
[ 1469.614671] usb 1-1.3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 1469.614689] usb 1-1.3: Product: JMS579
[ 1469.614706] usb 1-1.3: Manufacturer: JMicron
Hey Anders,
Excellent results, thanks for sharing! 7449 is a huge jump from 2553 so that was definitely worth your while. I would second your recommendation for others with the same chipset to update. Take care!
Hello
Thank you for a great article.
I’ve got one question, maybe a bit on the side, but do you think a setup with the Kingston A400 and a Startech usb 3.0 adapter will work with a img from LinuxCNC. I will be running an CNC router from the pi4 4 gb.
Hey Terje,
I’m actually not familiar with that distro. It looks like maybe it’s possible as I found a guide here. It sounds like USB booting works with it according to that guide. The drive and adapter hardware should be fine and those are both known to work. Best of luck and let us know how it turns out!
Hi there,
I’ve tested a aplic M.2 NGFF adapter with my RPi 4 (Home Assistant OS). Partitioning is OK, but I can boot or use it with the data partition only on USB 2.0 ports. No luck with 3.0.
Hey Fabio,
Thanks for the information! This is a tricky one. Normally with 2.5″ SATA adapters this is a firmware issue but not with M.2 NGFF. Those don’t have known compatibility issues really with the Pi in the same way as 2.5″ SATA.
They do have power issues though on USB 3.0 (USB 2.0 limits the amount of power provided so it will boot but it will perform very slowly). A powered USB hub should let you use it on the USB 3.0 ports effectively!
Any powered USB hub would work for sure for a test (I don’t think the Sabrent adapter I usually recommend is available on amazon.it that I could find on there but it’s likely because we have a different style wall socket connector here). Hopefully that helps!
Can you point me to any resources that will help me create and use multiple boot partitions on a single USB SSD? Can the Pi 4 B allow me to select a boot partition on a USB SSD on startup? I would like to use a Kingston A440S 240 GB SSD to experiment with 32-bit and 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS versions, Ubuntu, a Raspberry Pi OS lite for a Minecraft server, or others etc.. Is this even possible? Thanks!
Hey tah18,
It’s been a while since this came up but I do have a couple of resources for you. The only way I’ve ever heard of doing this is using BerryBoot. The good news is that it works on just about every Pi including the Pi 4 / Pi 400.
BerryBoot Page
YouTube video demonstrating BerryBoot with a SSD for multiple available boot OS choices (February of 2021, decently fresh).
It basically gives you a multiple boot OS selection screen like grub or some of the other alternatives would. Hopefully that helps!
Thanks for the prompt reply and helpful info. I have started looking into BerryBoot, and have also come across something called PINN. The latter seems to address the same issue. Not sure if either/both are up to date. Will do some digging. Thanks again!
Hey tah18,
No problem at all! I have not heard of PINN yet but definitely let us know if you try and it and it works well, I’m always on the look out for cool/handy new utilities!
BerryBoot should be up to date as they added Pi 400 support. The Pi 400 was released in October of 2020 so it is not even a year old and is the latest compatibility changes that would have came up with the Pi. Nothing else has been done in the Pi that is newer than the Pi 400 so BerryBoot is definitely as up to date as I think it’s going to get. Best of luck and let us know how it turns out!