**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.
Firmware updates can help but the more generic your manufacturer is the less likely they are to have any firmware updates available. It seems like their web site might be here? The JMS583 seems to always run pretty hot though even if you get a stable firmware version.
I’d definitely add that NVMe is really challenging to do over USB. Generics are probably not the way to go for NVMe. I have a few NVMe adapters that were very expensive but are rock solid. You can get away with generic USB to SATA adapters but USB to NVMe adapters it gets a lot scarier going generic.
You’re honestly probably lucky that it’s shutting down operations (which it’s supposed to do when it gets that hot). If that wasn’t implemented correctly it would probably fry whatever NVMe modules were thrown in there by the sound of how hot it’s getting so fast.
There seems to be more to this issue than just the firmware version .
I have 2 of the above ‘good’ enclosures “https://amzn.to/3ntgGi3” both which report this from lsusb
“ID 174c:235c ASMedia Technology Inc. Ugreen Storage Device”
No “ASM1153E” mentioned
On my PI4B I have never had a problem .
Move the device to my KUBUNTU machine and it fails miserably with the “uas_eh_abort_handler 0 uas-tag 2 inflight: CMD” error
Enabling “storage quirks” for the device and the errors go away
So I dont know if its the PI hardware or the fact that my PI is very lightly loaded .
If anyone has one of these enclosures that reports “ASM1153E” I would be interested in the model number printed in small letters on the back of the enclosure
The enclosure has nothing to do with the chipset. Hundreds of different storage adapters will share your same chipset. The adapter itself is just a piece of plastic or cheap metal and a housing to house the chipset they buy from someone else. UGREEN doesn’t make storage chipsets.
ASMedia *does* make storage chipsets. They undoubtedly sell the same chipset to hundreds of manufacturers. The adapter/enclosure manufacturer can choose which features are going to be enabled on the chipset. That’s why the firmware is different for all of these and using firmware from other brands typically won’t work.
In other words there are really only like 3-4 USB to SATA chipset manufacturers out there. There’s JMicron, ASMedia, Realtek and a few others that make the actual real chipsets that power these. That is the *real* storage chip. There are obviously *hundreds* of storage adapter/enclosure manufacturers and they are repackaging and using one of those few chipsets internally. Name brand, generic, it doesn’t matter. They’ll all have one of those chipsets from one of those few manufacturers that actually make them.
Now that we’ve covered that let’s explain what enabling storage quirks does. All it does is shut off UASP. That’s it. It also has about a 50% speed penalty over having UASP enabled so it’s not a good thing to have to turn quirks on. Now why wouldn’t UASP be working on your device? The answer is because the firmware that is shipped on your device either isn’t implementing UASP correctly or has bugs related to the Raspberry Pi.
Unfortunately UGREEN doesn’t offer any firmware updates for this device. You can go to their download page and enter your product code of 80556. All that is there is some EU compatibility PDF to download. No firmware updates provided.
The listing Amazon is linking to now is a USB 3.1 6 Gbps version. Those 6 Gbps chipsets seem to have a lot of issues. That’s an old chipset. Good chipsets for USB 3.1 will support 10G+ typically and people have much fewer problems with those.
There was a notorious transparent enclosure available from Orico that had both a 6Gbps chipset (probably the same one you have) that had massive issues until they finally released a firmware update for it. The 10Gbps version of the otherwise completely identical enclosure (basically with a higher quality chipset inside it powering it) always worked perfectly from day 1. I’m guessing if UGREEN provided a firmware update available for that old 6Gbps chipset it would fix it but they are not offering one at this time.
It’s up to you whether you want to use quirks at a 50% speed penalty or get a higher grade adapter but I think that’s what is going on here. Hopefully that helps!
SABRENT SATA USB 3.2 is not working. They even wrote it in the reviews but I discovered your webpage and the possibility that adapters sometimes just don’t work AFTER I bought it. So there you go. Here is the link, feel free to browse the reviews for “raspberry pi 4”
Also, your detailed guide is very ehm detailed.
I heard from younger 4b PIs one could “simply” install the EEPROM bootloader to a microSD, then the OS to a SSD, run the SD first, then shutdown and restart with the SSD.
And no other step then this… what about that?
You think that works or should I stick to your guide?
I actually do that all the time! Just not for the Raspberry Pi anymore typically but the trick still works. It shouldn’t be necessary with a good working adapter but I could see it helping.
If you search on my site for SSD Guide you’ll see I’ve wrote a ton of guides for other boards using the SD card bootstrapping method. You typically just put the boot files on the SD card and then the root partition is on the SSD.
I think this method still has a SD card boot section as well where we modify the PARTUUIDs. Hopefully that helps!
So our burgeoning paranormal site needs more deep storage; cutting-edgedly we thought of RAID6 4TB SSD on Pi4 USB3. Turns out there’s a limitation to the total number of USB3 devices usable in reality — we were able to get “only” 8 pieces of 4TB running RAID6 on a 10-port ANKER USB3 hub per Pi4 — such limitations! That ugly ‘bug’/feature is covered elsewhere. We ordered several dozen “StarLink USB 3.0” SATA to USB3 adapters from Amazon (and later a bunch more 3.1 versions of the same). We can confirm that the v3.0 StarLink adapters work; however we are seeing two models with differing VID:PID codes, as reported by lsusb command:
As you discovered, this works: ID 174c:55aa ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1053E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1153 SATA 3Gb/s bridge, ASM1153E SATA 6Gb/s bridge
But this also works: ID 14b0:0206 StarTech.com Ltd. SSD 870 EVO 4TB
Amazon sold us both as “StarLink SATA to USB 3.0”; by happenstance, we ended up with 4x of one and 4x of the other, coexisting, working great in a single RAID6 array.
I’ll comment later about the v3.1 StarLink as I explore and test more thanks to your useful page here.
ATB / eastGhost.com
Hi James! This page has been MOST helpful to trace this bug and identifying which adapter to buy! I just wanted to contribute adding that the ADATA XPG EX500 Tool-Free SATA III USB 3.1 External Enclosure for Hard Drive and Solid State Drive (AEX500U3-CRD, USB VID/PID: 125f:a73a) case has the same bug — that’s the first one I tried. Now I know: in the specs it doesn’t state it supports UASP, but as I’ve been using these mostly for inexpensively converting HDD from laptops which have been upgraded with SSDs, I haven’t had a speed problem because… well… HDDs.
I wanted to post this comment in reply to Michal’s, but I couldn’t find it. I hope someone find this useful. Thanks again!
Excellent, thanks for sharing that one! I think the post you are looking for might be in this thread. That article is about fixing the storage adapters with firmware updates and other means.
I think this is a great enclosure. We actually have 10 benchmarks on pibenchmarks.com for it. One of the scores is as high as 8,000 which is just about the max with USB 3.0 so I’d say this enclosure looks like it works really well.
Hello, I would like to know if anyone has experience with the ORICO adapter recommended by M.Yusuf in the section listed on this page – Known Working Adapters. It should be the second one listed on this page – (priced at $26.61 – NVMe – 10Gbps designation). I’d like to know if it definitely works for the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. Thank you, Tomas.
It depends on what you buy. This is a dangerous listing. Several of these will work and several of them won’t.
If you get the old USB 3.1 Gen1 one it won’t work. That’s the 6Gbps. You need to get one of the USB 3.1/3.2 Gen2 adapters. Those have updates and I’ve actually never seen one of those that won’t work. It’s always USB 3.1 Gen1 which are getting harder to find but Orico is still selling them on that listing.
I guess if you are confident they will send you the one that you order and won’t try to send you the 6Gbps version go for it. I personally wouldn’t even risk it. It’s going to be hard to even tell what they even sent you. They look exactly the same.
I mean the one you linked me to is bad. You linked me to a 5/6Gbps one. Yes, that one won’t work. Don’t waste your money. You need to buy the 10Gbps version and again, you’re going to have to be sure that’s what they really send you because they look exactly the same. One is much cheaper though.
This doesn’t even seem worth consideration. The broken adapter you linked me to is $13.99. I’m sure that’s the one you want and no it won’t work. The 10Gbps is $22. That makes it a very bad choice honestly considering the StarTech 10Gbps adapter is $18 from Amazon (with free shipping). You absolutely have to hope they send you the right one from the multilisting too. At least this one is from Orico official so they probably will send you the expensive version if you buy it.
I just see no reason to. You need to buy the expensive version for this to work and the expensive version is more expensive than my top recommendation. There’s no money to be saved here and you’ll regret it if you buy that cheap one that is *definitely* not Gen2. Lots of people have tried that here in the comments and most of them I had to tell you need to buy a new adapter (or to start attempting the firmware update dance to see if those will fix them). None of them saved a penny and that’s not even counting their time/frustration lost dealing with a bad chipset.
You’re basically falling into the “trap” here. They offer those low tier adapters for this cheap because they know they don’t work well with a lot of devices. It’s really that simple. If it was a good chipset it would cost as much as a good chipset in another adapter. The chipsets all come from the same companies (and none of them are the companies that make the adapters). They all buy from the same manufacturers. There are cheap ones and there are good ones. You don’t want a cheap one with the Pi.
The further back you go in the comments here the less sense this idea will make to you. This is not the place to try to save a few bucks. It’s an extremely fraught market with tons of known non-working adapters out there. And guess what all of the non-working adapters have in common? They cost a few dollars less than a good working adapter with a good chipset. If you’re using a PC you can buy an adapter this bad but don’t buy one this bad for the Pi (especially when the difference between a bad and good one is about $5).
I kind of understand what you wrote here and thank you :). But I write clearly that I want to order an adapter (frame) for PCIe NVMe hard drive – 10Gbps. Not a classic SATA 2,5″ HDD. The one in the link I sent is exactly the second one in the order and the description says ORICO M2 SSD Case NVMe USB Type C Gen2 10Gbps PCIe SSD Case. One more time then – in that link it is the second one with the description – NVMe – 10Gbps. And as I wrote, this same one is recommended by M.Yusuf in the section listed on this page – Known Working Adapters.
The model # is M2PZ-C3. I don’t have any reports on this one. I only have one for a variant.
So I got one of the ORICO NVMe enclosures with UASP support (ORICO M2PV-C3-BK-EP) and it worked immediately and nicely but it would lock up in a day or two, and sometimes in 14 hours with high CPU and high disk access.
I moved it to a USB powered hub and works fine with no lockups at all.
My conclusion is that I don’t think any of those NVMe USB enclosures can work without a USB powered hub unless your Pi is idle all the time.
Looks like a pig on power. Their model # is a slight variant of it. I don’t even think these are exactly the same. I don’t have any reports for whatever you just bought.
They’re not. They aren’t the same. Yours is the M2PV-C3. This is what I’ve been trying to tell you. His report is from years ago. It’s not even the same one you are linking to. You are linking to the C3 and no I don’t have a report that one is working. Let us know if it works since you already spent your money. I hope it does for you.
In fact we can tell from the model #s that there’s probably been several releases since January of 2021. This has a -C3 at the end so there was probably also a C2 at some point. They all look completely identical. See what I mean? You just bought this thinking it was the same one and it’s not. That’s why I don’t recommend people play games with these ones really.
The reason I said they were dangerous listings is it’s exceptionally hard to tell what you are buying. These all look identical but they’re not the same at all. It’s anyone’s guess if this one will work. This is a blind purchase (when I have tons of for sure working ones recommended).
If you want to push back on this I’d say don’t bother. I’ll believe you if you say it worked. You just seemed really determined to buy this one and that it’s exactly the same one as M.Yusuf’s but the truth is we don’t have any reports about this. I can tell you for a fact it’s not the same adapter (or model #). I have no idea if it will work and neither does anyone else that has reported in. You’ll be the first.
To be clear this is going exactly like everyone else who bought an Orico adapter positive it was going to work and didn’t get what they thought they did. This isn’t the first time it has happened. I really hope you aren’t one of the ones that tells me “I need to return it” or “it doesn’t make sense to return it because of shipping”. That has also happened before and I really hope that doesn’t happen to you. If it does you’d be another statistic of people misled by Orico’s nasty multilistings and completely identical looking models that are radically different internally with what chipset they use.
This is actually a completely blind purchase. You’re the first to ever purchase that model. Please let us know what happened. The C3 would be a different entry on the list. The last several people that did what you just did here never reported back (I’m guessing because a silent return of shame was done) after similarly initially pushing back. I wish you hadn’t done that because most people won’t report back after they back themselves into a corner like that.
For anyone else reading this I couldn’t give or show you a better example of why you need to be so careful. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that Orico multilisting was extremely dangerous. Hopefully you also see why when it comes to this line of Orico adapters I would just stay away. Who knows if they’ll even be offering the same variant of that exact same looking enclosure in 6 months or how many additional model #s there will be. Many of the other brands simply don’t have these risks. Orico is really bad about having 50 variants of everything they sell.
I didn’t know in my original reply for sure that you had bought the wrong one but I tried to warn you that you probably would and that lots of people have done this before. I tried to tell you it was a dangerous listing and I didn’t even need to look that closely to see that. Now that I’ve taken a closer look I can 100% guarantee this is a blind purchase and we have no reports on this adapter whatsoever.
I’d say there’s a good chance it will work since it’s Gen2. I doubt it will be outright incompatible. We’ll have to see if it’s a pig on power like the M2PV-C3-BK-EP or if there are any other issues. If it works well I’ll add it to the list!
Hopefully that helps and I was more clear about explaining why I was trying to warn you this time!
Okay, thank you very much. You’ve detailed it here more specifically for my particular adapter and I’ll probably let you know if this M2PV-C3 model will work, or how it will behave. I don’t know how you guessed it, but I really ordered it and it’s supposed to arrive in a month :). But thanks again and I’ll get back to you with feedback. Otherwise, maybe the people who didn’t let then know are happy users and didn’t need to confirm it anywhere anymore 🙂
Great question! So I’ll be completely honest with you. It’s pretty pointless to use NVMe with the Pi. It’s going to max out the USB 3.0 bus even with 2.5″ SATA. Remember, the Pi only supports USB 3.0. It does *not* support USB 3.1 or 3.2. You can’t actually hit speeds of 10Gbps or even 6Gbps.
Therefore I actually don’t recommend using NVMe at all. You’ll also typically need a powered USB hub with NVMe. That means you need a more expensive adapter, a USB hub and a more expensive drive and you will perform the same as someone who uses a 2.5″ SATA.
A 2.5″ SATA drive will max out the USB bus. Use those. I do. There is literally no point in using NVMe with the Pi. It’s honestly a waste of the NVMe drives capabilities because it is capable of so much more than the Pi can do. SATA almost never needs a powered USB hub either compared to NVMe which almost always does.
I suppose that’s why there’s not that many NVMe adapters in the list (and nobody really cares). I think I’ve made it more clear that it’s pointless to use NVMe in some of my newer articles related to this. When I wrote this article many years ago there wasn’t anything that could actually use NVMe in the single board computer world. Now there is so it makes even less sense to use it with the Pi than ever.
In my opinion if you are serious enough about performance to use NVMe then you should not be using the Pi 4 either. It’s a 5+ year old board that is essentially obsolete. There’s lots of boards that have NVMe now. It makes absolutely no sense to use with the Pi 4.
Hopefully that helps!
Thomas_Kr
Thanks again so much for your comprehensive answers, recommendations and experience. I want to try this with the Pi 4 and maybe there will be another use for this drive. Anyway, I’ll give feedback on how it turned out…
No problem at all! I’m excited to hear the feedback on it. If it works well we can at least add another NVMe option to the list!
Thomas_Kr
So after about 14 days, I can confirm the smooth functionality of the NVMe adapter – ORICO M2 SSD Case NVMe USB Type C Gen2 10Gbps PCIe (I’m using a Lenovo Samsung PM991A 256G M.2 PCIe NVMe 2242 SSD in it). It turned out fine :), thanks.
Beautiful, thanks for sharing! I believe Orico is one of the brands that got a special Raspberry Pi firmware update to fix a lot of their adapters. It sounds like this one is working well!
Gramdalf
Encountered this webpage… finally
Took me a while, but eventually figured out it was the adapter – I had this one.
Oh wow, I haven’t seen that listing before but it looks just like the Eluteng one. Like *exactly* like the Eluteng one from Amazon.com. I think this is probably that same problematic one being sold through another channel.
Thanks for sharing this version of it, I hadn’t seen it before as “Mediasonic”!
MAIWO for NVMe to USB-C (JMS583 chip) works for about 30 seconds on a POE+-powered RPi 4B. Very hot.
Hey Hats,
Yes, that’s a very common issue with that chipset. Check out this reddit thread here.
Firmware updates can help but the more generic your manufacturer is the less likely they are to have any firmware updates available. It seems like their web site might be here? The JMS583 seems to always run pretty hot though even if you get a stable firmware version.
I’d definitely add that NVMe is really challenging to do over USB. Generics are probably not the way to go for NVMe. I have a few NVMe adapters that were very expensive but are rock solid. You can get away with generic USB to SATA adapters but USB to NVMe adapters it gets a lot scarier going generic.
You’re honestly probably lucky that it’s shutting down operations (which it’s supposed to do when it gets that hot). If that wasn’t implemented correctly it would probably fry whatever NVMe modules were thrown in there by the sound of how hot it’s getting so fast.
Thanks for sharing and hopefully that helps!
There seems to be more to this issue than just the firmware version .
I have 2 of the above ‘good’ enclosures “https://amzn.to/3ntgGi3” both which report this from lsusb
“ID 174c:235c ASMedia Technology Inc. Ugreen Storage Device”
No “ASM1153E” mentioned
On my PI4B I have never had a problem .
Move the device to my KUBUNTU machine and it fails miserably with the “uas_eh_abort_handler 0 uas-tag 2 inflight: CMD” error
Enabling “storage quirks” for the device and the errors go away
So I dont know if its the PI hardware or the fact that my PI is very lightly loaded .
If anyone has one of these enclosures that reports “ASM1153E” I would be interested in the model number printed in small letters on the back of the enclosure
Hey John,
The enclosure has nothing to do with the chipset. Hundreds of different storage adapters will share your same chipset. The adapter itself is just a piece of plastic or cheap metal and a housing to house the chipset they buy from someone else. UGREEN doesn’t make storage chipsets.
ASMedia *does* make storage chipsets. They undoubtedly sell the same chipset to hundreds of manufacturers. The adapter/enclosure manufacturer can choose which features are going to be enabled on the chipset. That’s why the firmware is different for all of these and using firmware from other brands typically won’t work.
In other words there are really only like 3-4 USB to SATA chipset manufacturers out there. There’s JMicron, ASMedia, Realtek and a few others that make the actual real chipsets that power these. That is the *real* storage chip. There are obviously *hundreds* of storage adapter/enclosure manufacturers and they are repackaging and using one of those few chipsets internally. Name brand, generic, it doesn’t matter. They’ll all have one of those chipsets from one of those few manufacturers that actually make them.
Now that we’ve covered that let’s explain what enabling storage quirks does. All it does is shut off UASP. That’s it. It also has about a 50% speed penalty over having UASP enabled so it’s not a good thing to have to turn quirks on. Now why wouldn’t UASP be working on your device? The answer is because the firmware that is shipped on your device either isn’t implementing UASP correctly or has bugs related to the Raspberry Pi.
Unfortunately UGREEN doesn’t offer any firmware updates for this device. You can go to their download page and enter your product code of 80556. All that is there is some EU compatibility PDF to download. No firmware updates provided.
The listing Amazon is linking to now is a USB 3.1 6 Gbps version. Those 6 Gbps chipsets seem to have a lot of issues. That’s an old chipset. Good chipsets for USB 3.1 will support 10G+ typically and people have much fewer problems with those.
There was a notorious transparent enclosure available from Orico that had both a 6Gbps chipset (probably the same one you have) that had massive issues until they finally released a firmware update for it. The 10Gbps version of the otherwise completely identical enclosure (basically with a higher quality chipset inside it powering it) always worked perfectly from day 1. I’m guessing if UGREEN provided a firmware update available for that old 6Gbps chipset it would fix it but they are not offering one at this time.
It’s up to you whether you want to use quirks at a 50% speed penalty or get a higher grade adapter but I think that’s what is going on here. Hopefully that helps!
SABRENT SATA USB 3.2 is not working. They even wrote it in the reviews but I discovered your webpage and the possibility that adapters sometimes just don’t work AFTER I bought it. So there you go. Here is the link, feel free to browse the reviews for “raspberry pi 4”
Also, your detailed guide is very ehm detailed.
I heard from younger 4b PIs one could “simply” install the EEPROM bootloader to a microSD, then the OS to a SSD, run the SD first, then shutdown and restart with the SSD.
And no other step then this… what about that?
You think that works or should I stick to your guide?
BR
Sonny
Hey Sonny,
I actually do that all the time! Just not for the Raspberry Pi anymore typically but the trick still works. It shouldn’t be necessary with a good working adapter but I could see it helping.
If you search on my site for SSD Guide you’ll see I’ve wrote a ton of guides for other boards using the SD card bootstrapping method. You typically just put the boot files on the SD card and then the root partition is on the SSD.
I think this method still has a SD card boot section as well where we modify the PARTUUIDs. Hopefully that helps!
So our burgeoning paranormal site needs more deep storage; cutting-edgedly we thought of RAID6 4TB SSD on Pi4 USB3. Turns out there’s a limitation to the total number of USB3 devices usable in reality — we were able to get “only” 8 pieces of 4TB running RAID6 on a 10-port ANKER USB3 hub per Pi4 — such limitations! That ugly ‘bug’/feature is covered elsewhere. We ordered several dozen “StarLink USB 3.0” SATA to USB3 adapters from Amazon (and later a bunch more 3.1 versions of the same). We can confirm that the v3.0 StarLink adapters work; however we are seeing two models with differing VID:PID codes, as reported by lsusb command:
As you discovered, this works: ID 174c:55aa ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1053E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1153 SATA 3Gb/s bridge, ASM1153E SATA 6Gb/s bridge
But this also works: ID 14b0:0206 StarTech.com Ltd. SSD 870 EVO 4TB
Amazon sold us both as “StarLink SATA to USB 3.0”; by happenstance, we ended up with 4x of one and 4x of the other, coexisting, working great in a single RAID6 array.
I’ll comment later about the v3.1 StarLink as I explore and test more thanks to your useful page here.
ATB / eastGhost.com
Hey EastCoastCom,
Thanks for the report! Looks like that’s another good StarTech adapter. Thanks for sharing.
Let me know what happens with the USB 3.1 version!
Hi James! This page has been MOST helpful to trace this bug and identifying which adapter to buy! I just wanted to contribute adding that the ADATA XPG EX500 Tool-Free SATA III USB 3.1 External Enclosure for Hard Drive and Solid State Drive (AEX500U3-CRD, USB VID/PID: 125f:a73a) case has the same bug — that’s the first one I tried. Now I know: in the specs it doesn’t state it supports UASP, but as I’ve been using these mostly for inexpensively converting HDD from laptops which have been upgraded with SSDs, I haven’t had a speed problem because… well… HDDs.
I wanted to post this comment in reply to Michal’s, but I couldn’t find it. I hope someone find this useful. Thanks again!
Hey Marcos,
Excellent, thanks for sharing that one! I think the post you are looking for might be in this thread. That article is about fixing the storage adapters with firmware updates and other means.
I think this is a great enclosure. We actually have 10 benchmarks on pibenchmarks.com for it. One of the scores is as high as 8,000 which is just about the max with USB 3.0 so I’d say this enclosure looks like it works really well.
Thanks for sharing and take care!
Hello, I would like to know if anyone has experience with the ORICO adapter recommended by M.Yusuf in the section listed on this page – Known Working Adapters. It should be the second one listed on this page – (priced at $26.61 – NVMe – 10Gbps designation). I’d like to know if it definitely works for the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. Thank you, Tomas.
Hey Thomas,
It depends on what you buy. This is a dangerous listing. Several of these will work and several of them won’t.
If you get the old USB 3.1 Gen1 one it won’t work. That’s the 6Gbps. You need to get one of the USB 3.1/3.2 Gen2 adapters. Those have updates and I’ve actually never seen one of those that won’t work. It’s always USB 3.1 Gen1 which are getting harder to find but Orico is still selling them on that listing.
I guess if you are confident they will send you the one that you order and won’t try to send you the 6Gbps version go for it. I personally wouldn’t even risk it. It’s going to be hard to even tell what they even sent you. They look exactly the same.
I mean the one you linked me to is bad. You linked me to a 5/6Gbps one. Yes, that one won’t work. Don’t waste your money. You need to buy the 10Gbps version and again, you’re going to have to be sure that’s what they really send you because they look exactly the same. One is much cheaper though.
This doesn’t even seem worth consideration. The broken adapter you linked me to is $13.99. I’m sure that’s the one you want and no it won’t work. The 10Gbps is $22. That makes it a very bad choice honestly considering the StarTech 10Gbps adapter is $18 from Amazon (with free shipping). You absolutely have to hope they send you the right one from the multilisting too. At least this one is from Orico official so they probably will send you the expensive version if you buy it.
I just see no reason to. You need to buy the expensive version for this to work and the expensive version is more expensive than my top recommendation. There’s no money to be saved here and you’ll regret it if you buy that cheap one that is *definitely* not Gen2. Lots of people have tried that here in the comments and most of them I had to tell you need to buy a new adapter (or to start attempting the firmware update dance to see if those will fix them). None of them saved a penny and that’s not even counting their time/frustration lost dealing with a bad chipset.
You’re basically falling into the “trap” here. They offer those low tier adapters for this cheap because they know they don’t work well with a lot of devices. It’s really that simple. If it was a good chipset it would cost as much as a good chipset in another adapter. The chipsets all come from the same companies (and none of them are the companies that make the adapters). They all buy from the same manufacturers. There are cheap ones and there are good ones. You don’t want a cheap one with the Pi.
The further back you go in the comments here the less sense this idea will make to you. This is not the place to try to save a few bucks. It’s an extremely fraught market with tons of known non-working adapters out there. And guess what all of the non-working adapters have in common? They cost a few dollars less than a good working adapter with a good chipset. If you’re using a PC you can buy an adapter this bad but don’t buy one this bad for the Pi (especially when the difference between a bad and good one is about $5).
Hopefully that helps!
I kind of understand what you wrote here and thank you :). But I write clearly that I want to order an adapter (frame) for PCIe NVMe hard drive – 10Gbps. Not a classic SATA 2,5″ HDD. The one in the link I sent is exactly the second one in the order and the description says ORICO M2 SSD Case NVMe USB Type C Gen2 10Gbps PCIe SSD Case. One more time then – in that link it is the second one with the description – NVMe – 10Gbps. And as I wrote, this same one is recommended by M.Yusuf in the section listed on this page – Known Working Adapters.
The model # is M2PZ-C3. I don’t have any reports on this one. I only have one for a variant.
So I got one of the ORICO NVMe enclosures with UASP support (ORICO M2PV-C3-BK-EP) and it worked immediately and nicely but it would lock up in a day or two, and sometimes in 14 hours with high CPU and high disk access.I moved it to a USB powered hub and works fine with no lockups at all.
My conclusion is that I don’t think any of those NVMe USB enclosures can work without a USB powered hub unless your Pi is idle all the time.
Looks like a pig on power. Their model # is a slight variant of it. I don’t even think these are exactly the same. I don’t have any reports for whatever you just bought.
M.Yusuf’s report is from January of 2021. Here is the listing he linked to. I have bad news for you:
Model: Black-M2PVThey’re not. They aren’t the same. Yours is the M2PV-C3. This is what I’ve been trying to tell you. His report is from years ago. It’s not even the same one you are linking to. You are linking to the C3 and no I don’t have a report that one is working. Let us know if it works since you already spent your money. I hope it does for you.
In fact we can tell from the model #s that there’s probably been several releases since January of 2021. This has a -C3 at the end so there was probably also a C2 at some point. They all look completely identical. See what I mean? You just bought this thinking it was the same one and it’s not. That’s why I don’t recommend people play games with these ones really.
The reason I said they were dangerous listings is it’s exceptionally hard to tell what you are buying. These all look identical but they’re not the same at all. It’s anyone’s guess if this one will work. This is a blind purchase (when I have tons of for sure working ones recommended).
If you want to push back on this I’d say don’t bother. I’ll believe you if you say it worked. You just seemed really determined to buy this one and that it’s exactly the same one as M.Yusuf’s but the truth is we don’t have any reports about this. I can tell you for a fact it’s not the same adapter (or model #). I have no idea if it will work and neither does anyone else that has reported in. You’ll be the first.
To be clear this is going exactly like everyone else who bought an Orico adapter positive it was going to work and didn’t get what they thought they did. This isn’t the first time it has happened. I really hope you aren’t one of the ones that tells me “I need to return it” or “it doesn’t make sense to return it because of shipping”. That has also happened before and I really hope that doesn’t happen to you. If it does you’d be another statistic of people misled by Orico’s nasty multilistings and completely identical looking models that are radically different internally with what chipset they use.
This is actually a completely blind purchase. You’re the first to ever purchase that model. Please let us know what happened. The C3 would be a different entry on the list. The last several people that did what you just did here never reported back (I’m guessing because a silent return of shame was done) after similarly initially pushing back. I wish you hadn’t done that because most people won’t report back after they back themselves into a corner like that.
For anyone else reading this I couldn’t give or show you a better example of why you need to be so careful. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that Orico multilisting was extremely dangerous. Hopefully you also see why when it comes to this line of Orico adapters I would just stay away. Who knows if they’ll even be offering the same variant of that exact same looking enclosure in 6 months or how many additional model #s there will be. Many of the other brands simply don’t have these risks. Orico is really bad about having 50 variants of everything they sell.
I didn’t know in my original reply for sure that you had bought the wrong one but I tried to warn you that you probably would and that lots of people have done this before. I tried to tell you it was a dangerous listing and I didn’t even need to look that closely to see that. Now that I’ve taken a closer look I can 100% guarantee this is a blind purchase and we have no reports on this adapter whatsoever.
I’d say there’s a good chance it will work since it’s Gen2. I doubt it will be outright incompatible. We’ll have to see if it’s a pig on power like the M2PV-C3-BK-EP or if there are any other issues. If it works well I’ll add it to the list!
Hopefully that helps and I was more clear about explaining why I was trying to warn you this time!
Okay, thank you very much. You’ve detailed it here more specifically for my particular adapter and I’ll probably let you know if this M2PV-C3 model will work, or how it will behave. I don’t know how you guessed it, but I really ordered it and it’s supposed to arrive in a month :). But thanks again and I’ll get back to you with feedback. Otherwise, maybe the people who didn’t let then know are happy users and didn’t need to confirm it anywhere anymore 🙂
And yet then – would you have any specific recommendations for a seamless NVMe disk adapter? (sorry if you’ve mentioned one before).
Hey Thomas_Kr,
Great question! So I’ll be completely honest with you. It’s pretty pointless to use NVMe with the Pi. It’s going to max out the USB 3.0 bus even with 2.5″ SATA. Remember, the Pi only supports USB 3.0. It does *not* support USB 3.1 or 3.2. You can’t actually hit speeds of 10Gbps or even 6Gbps.
For example take a look at this typical SATA benchmark. It’s about 8,000 points on Pi Benchmarks.
Now what happens if you slap in a super expensive Samsung 980 Pro drive into a Pi? Nothing. A score of 7,428 so it’s actually worse.
Therefore I actually don’t recommend using NVMe at all. You’ll also typically need a powered USB hub with NVMe. That means you need a more expensive adapter, a USB hub and a more expensive drive and you will perform the same as someone who uses a 2.5″ SATA.
A 2.5″ SATA drive will max out the USB bus. Use those. I do. There is literally no point in using NVMe with the Pi. It’s honestly a waste of the NVMe drives capabilities because it is capable of so much more than the Pi can do. SATA almost never needs a powered USB hub either compared to NVMe which almost always does.
If you want to use NVMe you should be using the Compute Module 4. That’s the only place it makes any sense. It’s 100% pointless on the Pi 4. It simply doesn’t have the capabilities to use any of it.
I suppose that’s why there’s not that many NVMe adapters in the list (and nobody really cares). I think I’ve made it more clear that it’s pointless to use NVMe in some of my newer articles related to this. When I wrote this article many years ago there wasn’t anything that could actually use NVMe in the single board computer world. Now there is so it makes even less sense to use it with the Pi than ever.
Now to be honest with you I don’t even use the Raspberry Pi 4 anymore. Most of my stuff is running on the Orange Pi 5 now which does have real NVMe. I also moved my Home Assistant instance to the Orange Pi 5.
In my opinion if you are serious enough about performance to use NVMe then you should not be using the Pi 4 either. It’s a 5+ year old board that is essentially obsolete. There’s lots of boards that have NVMe now. It makes absolutely no sense to use with the Pi 4.
Hopefully that helps!
Thanks again so much for your comprehensive answers, recommendations and experience. I want to try this with the Pi 4 and maybe there will be another use for this drive. Anyway, I’ll give feedback on how it turned out…
Hey Thomas_Kr,
No problem at all! I’m excited to hear the feedback on it. If it works well we can at least add another NVMe option to the list!
So after about 14 days, I can confirm the smooth functionality of the NVMe adapter – ORICO M2 SSD Case NVMe USB Type C Gen2 10Gbps PCIe (I’m using a Lenovo Samsung PM991A 256G M.2 PCIe NVMe 2242 SSD in it). It turned out fine :), thanks.
Hey Thomas_Kr,
Beautiful, thanks for sharing! I believe Orico is one of the brands that got a special Raspberry Pi firmware update to fix a lot of their adapters. It sounds like this one is working well!
Encountered this webpage… finally
Took me a while, but eventually figured out it was the adapter – I had this one.
lsusbshows:152d:0578as the ID.Hey Gremdalf,
Oh wow, I haven’t seen that listing before but it looks just like the Eluteng one. Like *exactly* like the Eluteng one from Amazon.com. I think this is probably that same problematic one being sold through another channel.
Thanks for sharing this version of it, I hadn’t seen it before as “Mediasonic”!