Search Results for: SSD guide

Raspberry Pi 4 Ubuntu Server 18.04 Installation Guide

Published: March 5, 2019 / Last Modified: March 2, 2023 / 207 Comments / ,
Ubuntu Server logo

Ubuntu Server has been my favorite Linux distribution for years. On everything but the Raspberry Pi I run Ubuntu Server but felt stuck with Raspbian on the Pi. Until now!

The Raspberry Pi 4 is now supported. Previously Ubuntu Server for Pi (like many other distros) had broken or completely missing drivers for core components such as WiFi / Bluetooth. In the 18.04.2 update the firmware for the WiFi and other components is now included out of the box making it a fully functional distribution!

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Raspberry Pi Minecraft Server 1.13.2 / 1.14.4 Installation Script / Optimization Guide

Published: March 25, 2018 / Last Modified: September 4, 2022 / 65 Comments / ,
Raspberry Pi Minecraft Server Timings

Many things have changed since I wrote my last Raspberry Pi Minecraft Server guide.  OpenJDK is now the better supported Java for Raspberry Pi and Oracle is discontinuing support for Java 8 in January 2019.  Java 9 is out and Java 10 is soon to follow.  The Raspberry Pi 3B+ has also arrived!  After testing the server on the new 3B+ using Java 9 I was blown away by the performance and decided to write an updated guide and a script that will have you up and running in minutes.

To give you a taste of how smooth the timings are in Java 9 OpenJDK headless using the Paper Spigot Minecraft Server here is a nearly 2 hour session I played with my girlfriend.  This was played in survival mode on a brand new server so no blocks had been pregenerated and no settings were modified from the defaults.  Nothing is overclocked except the SD card.  There was even a village right by the spawn so many entities were in use.  Here’s the timings output report:

Raspberry Pi Minecraft Server Timings

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Turn Old mSATA SSDs To Fast USB Stick Drives

Published: March 10, 2018 / Last Modified: March 2, 2023 / 9 Comments / ,
Looking down the barrel of the mSATA drive

Since the M.2 NVME form factor has won the high performance solid state drive war many of you may be stuck with older micro SATA (mSATA) drives.  These still have a very awesome use that will only cost you $10 to take advantage and have a blistering USB stick instead of throw them away!

These are full blown SSDs and their performance blows a regular USB flash drive out of the water.  They support the trim command and show up as “fixed disks” instead or removable storage.  This means they support cache write optimizations that normal USB removable drives don’t.  This allows you to do all sorts of awesome things on them.  Some examples:  Windows to Go, Fast Portable Linux, Virtual Machine storage, etc.  You can also just use it as a really fast drive to transfer files back and forth with your friends while looking like a total techie badass.
Looking down the barrel of the mSATA drive
View of the top of the drive

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Raspberry Pi Minecraft V1.12 Server – Excellent Performance Guide

Published: June 12, 2017 / Last Modified: November 27, 2022 / 47 Comments / , ,
Minecraft 1.15 Buzzing Bees Update

The world of color update 1.12 has finally arrived! This walk through will show you how to set up a playable Minecraft server running on the Raspberry Pi.

I have read many tutorials on Google about how to set up a “great performing” Minecraft server on your Raspberry Pi and have been sorely disappointed by the results. Most tutorials are very outdated and tell you to turn your view distance all the way down to 4 (meaning you can’t see very far), or turn your entities (monsters/animals) down to settings so low that they hardly spawn or you can walk right up next to them before you see you.  After much research, trial and error, and spending time in the #Paper IRC channel talking to the smartest people in the Minecraft server configuration world I have been able to get the Minecraft Server (popular Paper fork based on Spigot) to run at vanilla settings (view distance 10, no reduction in entity settings). This means the server is suitable for full survival mode just like a regular vanilla Minecraft server.

To learn how read on!

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Using Ollama + Claude Code for Local Security Audits (No API Costs)

Published: April 20, 2026 / Last Modified: April 26, 2026 / Leave a Comment / ,
Claude Code with Ollama Qwen3.5 - 64k context window 27b parameters MoE model

I’ve been wanting to use AI to analyze my website, https://pibenchmarks.com, and uncover potential improvements (especially security issues) but without spending money on APIs or exposing my code to third-party services. This post walks through how I set up a fully local workflow using Ollama + Claude Code, running on my RTX 3090, to scan

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2024’s Fastest Raspberry Pi 5 Storage Benchmark Results

Published: December 29, 2024 / Last Modified: February 8, 2025 / 6 Comments / , , ,
Pi Benchmarks - 100,000 tests!

Pi Benchmarks has officially passed over 100,000 tests submitted! The site’s earliest tests started in early 2019 giving us over 5 years worth of real world testing by the single board computer (SBC) community across different boards.

Today we are going to cover the fastest combinations of hardware on the Raspberry Pi 5 to achieve the absolute highest storage scores and performance possible (and the top result *will* surprise you).

Let’s get started!

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Installing Steam on the Orange Pi 5 with Armbian

Published: March 31, 2023 / Last Modified: April 18, 2023 / 55 Comments / , , ,
Orange Pi 5 running Steam and Stardew Valley

The new RK3588/RK3588S boards have much more power than we’ve typically had available to us in the past on ARM boards. With a whopping 8 CPU cores and a Mali 610 GPU the Orange Pi 5 is capable of running Steam using Box64/Box86. It’s even able to play basic games pretty well (with some tinkering usually).

In this guide I’ll show you how to set up Steam on the Orange Pi 5 and run Stardew Valley on it. You should keep your expectations in line though because there is no native ARM client for Steam. We are using emulation and instruction translation. You will also likely be missing libraries for most games you try which will require some fiddling.

This guide is only for Armbian running the Ubuntu Jammy variant with the Gnome desktop installed only (platinum support status). The Orange Pi official distributions will not have 3D support and I don’t care about whatever other flavor of Linux you are running either. I’m not going to install your preferred flavor of Linux and try to figure out how to do this on there nor am I interested in troubleshooting it. Please don’t ask.

With all of that being said let’s get started!

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Genie Garage Door Opener Aladdin Smart Home Upgrade

Published: February 24, 2023 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 5 Comments / , ,
Genie Aladdin Connect - Installed

I’ve been investigating ways to make my garage doors on my home “smart”. My overall goal is to implement them into Home Assistant. I’ve been investigating various options to do this including do-it-yourself with ESP modules (which I’ve used for a lot of other parts of my home automation).

My home is only about 3 years old and came preinstalled with a “dumb” Genie garage door system that does not have smart capabilities. I decided to investigate the official upgrade option offered by the company via their Aladdin smart home upgrade kit as it only cost about $60.

In this guide I’ll cover installing the upgrade kit for Genie garage doors and how well it performed. I’ll also cover implementing it within Home Assistant. Let’s get started!

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Best 2023 Raspberry Pi Alternatives

Published: February 21, 2023 / Last Modified: April 27, 2026 / 37 Comments / , , , ,
Radxa Rock 5B Review

The Raspberry Pi continues to suffer from supply chain issues. They have promised there are a lot of their very old models that should be coming up for purchase within the next 6 months. I’ve been hearing that for years though to be honest with you.

Fortunately you don’t need to wait. There are more and better alternatives to the Raspberry Pi in 2023 than there have ever been before. In this article I’ll cover the best Raspberry Pi alternatives in 2023.

Let’s get started!

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StarFive VisionFive 2 High Performance RISC-V SBC Review

Published: January 23, 2023 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 14 Comments / , , ,
StarFive VisionFive 2 - Top View

I’ve reviewed several RISC-V boards on the site at this point including the Lichee RV and the Mango Pi MQ Quad. All of those boards only had a single core CPU though and aren’t suitable for high performance applications.

Today I am going to review what SiFive describes as “the world’s first high-performance RISC-V single board computer (SBC) with an integrated GPU”. We’ll explore the capabilities and performance of the board and see if it lives up to these claims. We’ll also compare it to a Raspberry Pi as it has the same number of CPU cores as a Raspberry Pi.

Let’s get started!

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