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!

Raspberry Pi 4 Ubuntu Server / Desktop 18.04.4 Image

Published: / Last Modified: March 17, 2022 / 321 Comments / , ,
Fine, I'll do it myself

This is a unofficial distribution of Ubuntu Server 18.04.3 for Raspberry Pi 4. It is provided with the purpose of letting us all play with the new Pi 4’s new increased RAM and other capabilities until Ubuntu’s repositories are updated with support for the newest Pi.

Once official support is released through the Ubuntu repositories this project will effectively cease to exist (until, dare I dream, the Pi 5?). The image supports KVM, has support for the Pi 4’s new 3D display driver, and can also be upgraded to a full desktop installation!

Raspberry Pi 4 USB Boot Config Guide for SSD / Flash Drives

Published: / Last Modified: April 29, 2022 / 966 Comments / , , ,
Raspberry Pi 4 with Samsung 950 Pro NVME SSD

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!

Raspberry Pi Storage Benchmarks + Benchmarking Script

Published: / Last Modified: April 28, 2022 / 81 Comments / , ,
Pi Benchmark 2019 Contenders

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

Raspberry Pi Cheap SSD Upgrade Guide

Published: / Last Modified: April 28, 2022 / 55 Comments / , ,
SSD now cheaper than Micro SD cards

I’ve covered the benefits of taking your Raspberry Pi to a solid state drive (SSD) before extensively in this article but in a nutshell you get around a 280% increase in raw throughput and a 1000% increase in 4k random read/writes over a MicroSD card.

In this article I will teach you how to upgrade to a SSD on your Raspberry Pi for under $30.

Raspberry Pi 3B+ MicroSD / SSD Speed Benchmarks

Published: / Last Modified: March 16, 2022 / 12 Comments / , ,
The contenders for the RPI storage benchmarks

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!

Turn Old mSATA SSDs To Fast USB Stick Drives

Published: / Last Modified: April 3, 2022 / 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

Overclocking Samsung Pro Plus MicroSD to 99MHz on Raspberry Pi

Published: / Last Modified: March 17, 2022 / 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: March 27, 2022 / 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.