Benchmarking

It has been a while since I covered storage benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi because every time I sat down to write it I ended up adding new features to the SBC storage benchmarks web site and it never got finished. Definitely make sure you check out the web site frontend as it will always give you up to date benchmarks!

There definitely have been some changes since my last coverage of this with the Compute Module 4 now dominating the charts by taking advantage of real NVMe via PCIe adapters to achieve speeds never seen before on the Pi. Let’s get right into it!

To this day it can still be treacherous to buy a storage adapter for your Raspberry Pi 4. There are many that will not work properly and perform very poorly.

I have created a “Best Storage Adapters for Raspberry Pi 4” list. Let’s get started!

Storage options continue to advance at a very fast pace. We’ve seen a lot of changes in the past couple of years with viable storage options for your Pi. Solid state drives are now so cheap that it can be cheaper to outfit your Pi with a SSD than buy a MicroSD card! MicroSD cards also continue to evolve with the new “Application Class” A1 and A2 certifications.

This year I wanted to do something more than just benchmark my ever-growing pile of MicroSD cards and solid state drives. Although I have a wide variety of storage to test I don’t have everything! So this time I created a benchmark that gives you a easy to compare score and anonymously submits the storage specifications and the results to this site.

Running the benchmark is a one-liner:
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/PiBenchmarks/master/Storage.sh | sudo bash

After publishing my Raspberry Pi Minecraft Server tutorial I got some feedback on Reddit to try using a USB SSD for storage.  I expected some marginal improvement but nothing spectacular due to the USB 2.0 bus data rates.  In fact the results were so spectacular that I’m changing my storage recommendations entirely.  Let the games begin!

For the past couple of weeks I have been putting together a Minecraft 1.12 Raspberry Pi Guide and have been using my several year old Samsung Evo 32GB cards. After reading several blogs and benchmarks I decided to purchase some Samsung Evo+ 32GB cards off Amazon because they benchmarked better than my orange Evo cards I already have.

Let me start out by saying I love Amazon and am a Prime member and buy almost everything there. I bought two Evo+ 32GB cards from Amazon and received them very quickly as usual. However, once I started using them, I figured out that they were either fake or Samsung had revised the model and it performed terribly. I don’t just mean slightly underspec bad either. I mean worse than my Walgreens ghetto off the shelf cards I bought on clearance!

In this article I’m going to show you how to benchmark your SD card on the Raspberry Pi, and I’m also going to include how to use a popular utility to benchmark them on Windows if you don’t have a Raspberry Pi.