Storage

Category page of all posts on the web site that are tagged as related to storage including benchmarking, various storage devices, walkthroughs and more!

Turn Old mSATA SSDs To Fast USB 3.0 Flash Drives

Published: / Last Modified: June 21, 2021 / 7 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

Overclocking Samsung Pro Plus MicroSD to 99MHz on Raspberry Pi

Published: / Last Modified: July 7, 2021 / 2 Comments / ,

In my quest for maximum performing MicroSD cards in the Raspberry Pi I decided to purchase the top performing card in most benchmarks which is the Samsung Pro+. However, the common overclock for the Raspberry PI SD port to 100MHz does not seem to work with these cards and they become unstable. However, through a little bit of tweaking and experimentation, I found that these cards can be clocked to 99MHz and work just fine and provide a substantial performance boost. Read on for the details!

Benchmark Your Raspberry Pi MicroSD Cards – Fakes Everywhere!

Published: / Last Modified: June 4, 2021 / 2 Comments / , ,
Samsung Pro Plus unboxed

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.