**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.
The nvme white label have the following info/input
+3.3V and 1.3A
dont know if it handles high perf drives like samsung 980 pro that have “2.9A” however…
That sounds right to me! The lower power usage SSDs will be just fine. This tends to be the lower performance ones and it also can be the smaller capacity Samsung ones like the 250/500 sizes for example. Generic OEM drives like that Toshiba are definitely ones I would expect to work without having to get a powered USB hub.
If you are using a Samsung 980 (non Pro) it *might* work without a powered USB hub but for the high performance model definitely no way. Even if it works it won’t be working at the highest performance state which with a drive that nice you definitely want to get full performance.
Thanks for leaving your detailed drive model / experience!
Hey there, thanks for this. I recently decided to switch one of my pi4’s to SSD and used this enclosure (not realizing how particular one night need to be when buying these) – Worked like a charm. I actually had one of the Sabrent 3.0 enclosures lying around and tried to do the same with another pi4. Really beat my head against the wall on it until I found your blog. I tested the second pi setup with this enclosure and sure enough, it worked! Just picked up another one of the inland enclosures to wrap that project up.
Sorry to hear about the Sabrent! It has been many years but the reason I wrote my original USB booting articles for the Pi 4 was because I had the incredibly common Sabrent EC-SSHD adapter. This adapter worked fine on the Pi 3 so a lot of us had it already (and it was basically a top seller on Amazon already by that point for that reason).
We were dead in the water on the Pi 4 with the same adapter which started my search for working adapters and then ultimately led to this list which is far beyond anything I could have done myself. If I bought every adapter on the list I would have spent literally thousands on just adapters.
Although the Amazon links are monetized I get like 1-2% of an adapter cost so selling one makes like 10-15 cents so it has to be a *lot* of adapters to add up to anything even significant enough to pay for the server’s monthly costs (about $80/mo for a fairly beefy Amazon Lightsail instance so that’s a *lot* of adapters). Monetizing a web site in 2022 is mostly a dream without filling it with garbage trackers / popups (which I’m unwilling to do) unless you’re *really* big and I guess that’s what I’m going for since I’m still in this industry for some reason.
It’s really only the community that makes it even possible though is the truth. It’s more of a community effort at this point along with pibenchmarks.com and that is why it has got so comprehensive / good. The Pi community has always been fantastic and is definitely why I keep writing content for it still! As long as you guys are doing cool stuff with them and are willing to engage with (or able to find) the content I will keep trying to do it for sure.
It’s actually possible to get the EC-SSHD (kind of) working if you do all of the Sabrent firmware updates *and* always use quirks mode. It’s still a pretty bad choice but it’s at least possible to get it going now (but not with UAS enabled, it needs quirks mode even with the firmware updates without which it won’t work at all).
That’s very exciting that your projects are all coming together here. It should prove worthy of your time and effort as the speeds are *blistering* for IO compared to a SD card. Enjoy and take care!
They mentioned they ended up using an Orico adapter in quirks mode, speaking of which have you tried using quirks mode yet? The article explains how to turn it on but I think it may be worth a try in your case. The VL711 definitely does look problematic though here!
I did some more research here using pibenchmarks.com. I searched for VL711 and had literally 0 results. I’ve never seen a successful benchmark submitted with that adapter.
JMS567 does have some results. Lots of people are using a working version of that somehow. It may mean they had firmware updates available for their adapters/enclosures that were using a JMS567 chipset. Did you check to see if you could find any?
One more thing I should ask is what kind of drive are you trying to power? It’s possible that it’s a power issue if this happens to be something like a 3.5″ HDD or something that will take a lot more power than a 2.5″ SSD or M.2 SATA SSD. Often when you can only use USB 2.0 it’s because you don’t have enough power to use USB 3.0 (USB 2.0 can’t allow as much power through as USB 3.0). If your power budget is too tight it may explain why it’s working over USB 2.0 only as that will leave more power for the rest of the Pi (but the drive will perform really slowly or not boot successfully depending on how little power).
If you happen to have a powered USB hub it would be good to test for this. Also keep in mind the Pi shares a 1.2A power limit across all of your plugged in USB accessories *combined*. This means the drive can’t get 1.2A and then your keyboard can get 0.1A, etc. You have 1.2A total and everything you plug in has to be subtracted from that if that makes sense. I figured I’d mention this because with that many successful JMS567 it’s worth checking for power even though I usually don’t as often outside of NVMe drives. Definitely let us know what you find!
James, I first plugged the JMS567 via a passthrough USB tester in USB2 socket and observed the current to be <= 0.17a. Then I plugged it into USB3 and o wonder! the device booted up, the current being in the same range. The SSD is a 2.5" 240 Gb Goodram SSD. Then I again plugged the Raspberry into USB3 without the USB tester and again it stuck on a screen suggesting to install OS on Raspberry and showing the device is stuck in attempt to boot via USB-MSB(?)
The rest of the connected devices is a Logitech Unifying receiver which consumes < 0.01a and Ethernet connection.
Gotcha. I wouldn’t expect that Goodram to be a power issue either. It doesn’t sound like any USB devices that would cause a problem either.
It’s most likely firmware issues it sounds like to me. If you are feeling extra adventurous you could try a generic flash as this is not unheard of. You could do this if your adapter’s manufacturer doesn’t provide any firmware for it. You basically try to use another manufacturer’s firmware and get as close as you can. We’ve seen it fix it completely and make it worse depending on how appropriate the firmware is for the device.
I usually only recommend this if we’re pretty certain that this is the problem. Given that you got multimeter readings I would say we are at that point. It would help if you had another SSD to test with other than the Goodram to rule out the drive as in some rare cases we have seen drive / drive firmware compatibility issues.
It’s really mimicking power issues especially since you got it to boot up once even over USB 3.0 but the subsequent boot failed. Power issues often manifest this way. It could actually be both as in your JMS567 firmware is using more power than it should over USB 3.0 which might be fixed by firmware updates.
This is a really tricky one. I think we are at the point that it’s worth trying to update your firmware but I wanted to give the heads up that in a few cases things were slightly worse with firmware updates than stock. We also have successful fixes too. It’s kind of a “hail mary” play to get it working before basically having to buy a different adapter that has better compatibility if that makes sense.
Hopefully that helps and let me know how it turns out as I’m really curious what is going on with this one!
Oleg
I chose the way of the weakhearted – bought an adapter st-lab U-1450 which boasted the chipset ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1153. And it worked from USB3.0(Raspberry Pi 4b) right away! Thanks James for pointing in that direction!
No worries at all, I think that’s a good choice and I’m glad you got everything working!
Oleg
As for firmware upgrades for JMS567, I don’t see any at the site of JMicron Or you mean there could be upgrades for an adapter itself? My adapter is noname and I have no notion on how to upgrade it.
The updates should be available by your adapter/enclosure manufacturer if they are the right ones. The JMicron is just the chipset and hundreds of manufacturers order JMicron chipsets and stick them in adapters both expensive and dirt cheap. All of the adapters have different firmware on them. It’s best to get Sabrent firmware for Sabrent enclosures like in that article but that is not always possible.
I have a feeling yours is not going to be from a major manufacturer that has adapter firmware updates available (it looks like you confirmed this as well). I’m judging this by it’s performance as the ones from the bigger manufacturers tend to have most of these ironed out or at least have the updates easily available.
If your drive manufacturer doesn’t have one available you actually have to use someone else’s to try and flash it. That is why this is rolling the dice as they are all different. That’s what I meant by a “generic” flash. You are flashing a generic adapter that has no updates available for it with a version from another manufacturer that works correctly. It’s not the “official” version though for your adapter which is why you generally want to get it from your adapter manufacturer.
It’s basically a last resort. Unless there’s some kind of Goodram compatibility issue with that adapter that can be fixed with a drive update or your Pi’s firmware is not up to date or one of the few remaining alternative explanations past trying something like this you essentially have an adapter that doesn’t seem to be compatible with the Pi (at least with the firmware the manufacturer shipped on that adapter, we know it can work with other firmware from different manufacturers, we don’t yet know if your adapter will be similar enough to take other companies updates and work properly).
We don’t know what will happen if you try it but I can say from the comments here over the years that in a few cases it was slightly worse, in probably more cases than that it was successful, and in probably the most cases there was no change at all.
Here’s an example where it was worse (the behavior was unchanged but he started getting an issue when plugging in certain USB version devices).
This is with the dreaded ELUTENG adapter. There’s no saving that one. Your case reminds me a lot of his even including the mimicking power issues. This gives me pause a little bit as the ELUTENG is also the JMS567 and yours is acting exactly like that one was. It would not surprise me if this is the ELUTENG, or is the same as whatever the ELUTENG really is sourced from and also undoubtedly rebranded. In his case you will say he said “I am willing to brick/kill it” before we tried this. You should be too and you should definitely not try it if it is the ELUTENG or looks like it. We’ve never had a brick yet but that is a clear case of it becoming “worse” from trying this.
There are *dozens* of people that never got these working though if you put JMS567 in the search box at the top of the comments including lots of AliExpress ones and unusual generic names that you may recognize (unless it’s completely brandless which is also common).
Hopefully that explains that piece a little better!
Hello Andrew! A JMS567-based adapter works with a GOODRAM SATA SSD via USB 2.0 only. Via USB 3 port it produces some verbose output but doesn’t load. Interestingly, the same adaptor works OK via USB 3 with a 2.5″ Samsung HD ST1000LM024
wavlink WL-ST239 – This uses the JMS578 chipset (JMicron) and is incredibly slow without quirks, to the point of being unusable. Device id is 152d:0578. Can be used with quirks applied.
I checked for that one and I didn’t see any firmware updates on their site unfortunately for this one. A lot of the time they will have an update that will fix issues such as UASP, etc.
People have sometimes tried updating them with firmware from other manufacturers but I honestly don’t recommend it because we’ve had a few times where it actually made things worse (and a few times it has made things better).
Toshiba KXG6AZNV256G nvme works fine with SABRENT USB 3.2
The nvme white label have the following info/input
+3.3V and 1.3A
dont know if it handles high perf drives like samsung 980 pro that have “2.9A” however…
Hey JustAGuestPassingBy,
That sounds right to me! The lower power usage SSDs will be just fine. This tends to be the lower performance ones and it also can be the smaller capacity Samsung ones like the 250/500 sizes for example. Generic OEM drives like that Toshiba are definitely ones I would expect to work without having to get a powered USB hub.
If you are using a Samsung 980 (non Pro) it *might* work without a powered USB hub but for the high performance model definitely no way. Even if it works it won’t be working at the highest performance state which with a drive that nice you definitely want to get full performance.
Thanks for leaving your detailed drive model / experience!
I can report that the Orico 2588US3 works after applying quirks (Seagate 500GB SSD)
Excellent, thanks Graham, I didn’t have a report for that specific model!
Hey there, thanks for this. I recently decided to switch one of my pi4’s to SSD and used this enclosure (not realizing how particular one night need to be when buying these) – Worked like a charm. I actually had one of the Sabrent 3.0 enclosures lying around and tried to do the same with another pi4. Really beat my head against the wall on it until I found your blog. I tested the second pi setup with this enclosure and sure enough, it worked! Just picked up another one of the inland enclosures to wrap that project up.
Hey Ryan,
Sorry to hear about the Sabrent! It has been many years but the reason I wrote my original USB booting articles for the Pi 4 was because I had the incredibly common Sabrent EC-SSHD adapter. This adapter worked fine on the Pi 3 so a lot of us had it already (and it was basically a top seller on Amazon already by that point for that reason).
We were dead in the water on the Pi 4 with the same adapter which started my search for working adapters and then ultimately led to this list which is far beyond anything I could have done myself. If I bought every adapter on the list I would have spent literally thousands on just adapters.
Although the Amazon links are monetized I get like 1-2% of an adapter cost so selling one makes like 10-15 cents so it has to be a *lot* of adapters to add up to anything even significant enough to pay for the server’s monthly costs (about $80/mo for a fairly beefy Amazon Lightsail instance so that’s a *lot* of adapters). Monetizing a web site in 2022 is mostly a dream without filling it with garbage trackers / popups (which I’m unwilling to do) unless you’re *really* big and I guess that’s what I’m going for since I’m still in this industry for some reason.
It’s really only the community that makes it even possible though is the truth. It’s more of a community effort at this point along with pibenchmarks.com and that is why it has got so comprehensive / good. The Pi community has always been fantastic and is definitely why I keep writing content for it still! As long as you guys are doing cool stuff with them and are willing to engage with (or able to find) the content I will keep trying to do it for sure.
It’s actually possible to get the EC-SSHD (kind of) working if you do all of the Sabrent firmware updates *and* always use quirks mode. It’s still a pretty bad choice but it’s at least possible to get it going now (but not with UAS enabled, it needs quirks mode even with the firmware updates without which it won’t work at all).
That’s very exciting that your projects are all coming together here. It should prove worthy of your time and effort as the speeds are *blistering* for IO compared to a SD card. Enjoy and take care!
Thank you James!
I’ve also tested an adapter on chipset VIA Labs VL711. It also won’t boot Raspberry Pi 4 but works fine on a Windows 10 laptop.
Hey Oleg,
Dang, I do have a report about that one but it’s not a good report either:
They mentioned they ended up using an Orico adapter in quirks mode, speaking of which have you tried using quirks mode yet? The article explains how to turn it on but I think it may be worth a try in your case. The VL711 definitely does look problematic though here!
Tried quirks mode for both JMS567 and VL711 hoping to achieve SSD booting via USB3 – worked for none(
Hey Oleg,
I did some more research here using pibenchmarks.com. I searched for VL711 and had literally 0 results. I’ve never seen a successful benchmark submitted with that adapter.
JMS567 does have some results. Lots of people are using a working version of that somehow. It may mean they had firmware updates available for their adapters/enclosures that were using a JMS567 chipset. Did you check to see if you could find any?
One more thing I should ask is what kind of drive are you trying to power? It’s possible that it’s a power issue if this happens to be something like a 3.5″ HDD or something that will take a lot more power than a 2.5″ SSD or M.2 SATA SSD. Often when you can only use USB 2.0 it’s because you don’t have enough power to use USB 3.0 (USB 2.0 can’t allow as much power through as USB 3.0). If your power budget is too tight it may explain why it’s working over USB 2.0 only as that will leave more power for the rest of the Pi (but the drive will perform really slowly or not boot successfully depending on how little power).
If you happen to have a powered USB hub it would be good to test for this. Also keep in mind the Pi shares a 1.2A power limit across all of your plugged in USB accessories *combined*. This means the drive can’t get 1.2A and then your keyboard can get 0.1A, etc. You have 1.2A total and everything you plug in has to be subtracted from that if that makes sense. I figured I’d mention this because with that many successful JMS567 it’s worth checking for power even though I usually don’t as often outside of NVMe drives. Definitely let us know what you find!
James, I first plugged the JMS567 via a passthrough USB tester in USB2 socket and observed the current to be <= 0.17a. Then I plugged it into USB3 and o wonder! the device booted up, the current being in the same range. The SSD is a 2.5" 240 Gb Goodram SSD. Then I again plugged the Raspberry into USB3 without the USB tester and again it stuck on a screen suggesting to install OS on Raspberry and showing the device is stuck in attempt to boot via USB-MSB(?)
The rest of the connected devices is a Logitech Unifying receiver which consumes < 0.01a and Ethernet connection.
typo, I plugged the SSD in USB3 of course
Hey Oleg,
Gotcha. I wouldn’t expect that Goodram to be a power issue either. It doesn’t sound like any USB devices that would cause a problem either.
It’s most likely firmware issues it sounds like to me. If you are feeling extra adventurous you could try a generic flash as this is not unheard of. You could do this if your adapter’s manufacturer doesn’t provide any firmware for it. You basically try to use another manufacturer’s firmware and get as close as you can. We’ve seen it fix it completely and make it worse depending on how appropriate the firmware is for the device.
I have an article on this here: Fixing Storage Adapters for Raspberry Pi via Firmware Updates
I usually only recommend this if we’re pretty certain that this is the problem. Given that you got multimeter readings I would say we are at that point. It would help if you had another SSD to test with other than the Goodram to rule out the drive as in some rare cases we have seen drive / drive firmware compatibility issues.
It’s really mimicking power issues especially since you got it to boot up once even over USB 3.0 but the subsequent boot failed. Power issues often manifest this way. It could actually be both as in your JMS567 firmware is using more power than it should over USB 3.0 which might be fixed by firmware updates.
This is a really tricky one. I think we are at the point that it’s worth trying to update your firmware but I wanted to give the heads up that in a few cases things were slightly worse with firmware updates than stock. We also have successful fixes too. It’s kind of a “hail mary” play to get it working before basically having to buy a different adapter that has better compatibility if that makes sense.
Hopefully that helps and let me know how it turns out as I’m really curious what is going on with this one!
I chose the way of the weakhearted – bought an adapter st-lab U-1450 which boasted the chipset ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1153. And it worked from USB3.0(Raspberry Pi 4b) right away! Thanks James for pointing in that direction!
Hey Oleg,
No worries at all, I think that’s a good choice and I’m glad you got everything working!
As for firmware upgrades for JMS567, I don’t see any at the site of JMicron Or you mean there could be upgrades for an adapter itself? My adapter is noname and I have no notion on how to upgrade it.
The updates should be available by your adapter/enclosure manufacturer if they are the right ones. The JMicron is just the chipset and hundreds of manufacturers order JMicron chipsets and stick them in adapters both expensive and dirt cheap. All of the adapters have different firmware on them. It’s best to get Sabrent firmware for Sabrent enclosures like in that article but that is not always possible.
I have a feeling yours is not going to be from a major manufacturer that has adapter firmware updates available (it looks like you confirmed this as well). I’m judging this by it’s performance as the ones from the bigger manufacturers tend to have most of these ironed out or at least have the updates easily available.
If your drive manufacturer doesn’t have one available you actually have to use someone else’s to try and flash it. That is why this is rolling the dice as they are all different. That’s what I meant by a “generic” flash. You are flashing a generic adapter that has no updates available for it with a version from another manufacturer that works correctly. It’s not the “official” version though for your adapter which is why you generally want to get it from your adapter manufacturer.
It’s basically a last resort. Unless there’s some kind of Goodram compatibility issue with that adapter that can be fixed with a drive update or your Pi’s firmware is not up to date or one of the few remaining alternative explanations past trying something like this you essentially have an adapter that doesn’t seem to be compatible with the Pi (at least with the firmware the manufacturer shipped on that adapter, we know it can work with other firmware from different manufacturers, we don’t yet know if your adapter will be similar enough to take other companies updates and work properly).
We don’t know what will happen if you try it but I can say from the comments here over the years that in a few cases it was slightly worse, in probably more cases than that it was successful, and in probably the most cases there was no change at all.
Here’s an example where it was worse (the behavior was unchanged but he started getting an issue when plugging in certain USB version devices).
This is with the dreaded ELUTENG adapter. There’s no saving that one. Your case reminds me a lot of his even including the mimicking power issues. This gives me pause a little bit as the ELUTENG is also the JMS567 and yours is acting exactly like that one was. It would not surprise me if this is the ELUTENG, or is the same as whatever the ELUTENG really is sourced from and also undoubtedly rebranded. In his case you will say he said “I am willing to brick/kill it” before we tried this. You should be too and you should definitely not try it if it is the ELUTENG or looks like it. We’ve never had a brick yet but that is a clear case of it becoming “worse” from trying this.
Now here’s an example of someone who *was* able to get it to work (but only with quirks, and only after all the updates).
There are *dozens* of people that never got these working though if you put JMS567 in the search box at the top of the comments including lots of AliExpress ones and unusual generic names that you may recognize (unless it’s completely brandless which is also common).
Hopefully that explains that piece a little better!
..besides, this JMS567 adaptor works via USB3 port with a Windows10 laptop.
Hello Andrew! A JMS567-based adapter works with a GOODRAM SATA SSD via USB 2.0 only. Via USB 3 port it produces some verbose output but doesn’t load. Interestingly, the same adaptor works OK via USB 3 with a 2.5″ Samsung HD ST1000LM024
Hey Oleg,
Ahhh yes the JMS567. I’ve definitely seen issues with this one before! Check out these threads:
Thread #1
Thread #2
Are there any updates available from your manufacturer for the firmware by chance? Those can definitely sometimes help but aren’t always available!
wavlink WL-ST239 – This uses the JMS578 chipset (JMicron) and is incredibly slow without quirks, to the point of being unusable. Device id is 152d:0578. Can be used with quirks applied.
Hey Andrew,
I checked for that one and I didn’t see any firmware updates on their site unfortunately for this one. A lot of the time they will have an update that will fix issues such as UASP, etc.
People have sometimes tried updating them with firmware from other manufacturers but I honestly don’t recommend it because we’ve had a few times where it actually made things worse (and a few times it has made things better).
Thanks for letting us know!