Thank you for this video. I'm a 42-year IT veteran, and have a BSEE I earned before the age of ICs. I thought your presentation was beautiful: succinct and accurate to every detail; your range of tests was well thought-out (heat being the sworn enemy of all electronic circuits); and the comparisons were exquisite -- perfect for somebody who cares about maximizing their < $100 USD. If all your vids are this good, I'm going to watch all of them. I'm subbed, BTW -- *good job!*
My goal was to use the PI 4 as a browser with a big screen tv to replace an older ROKU. Using an SD Card, the PI 4 chromium browser performance was unacceptable, but with a USB 2.0 drive, it worked just fine using the standard chromium browser. Ublock blocks ads & my second PI 4 serves as a DNS filter so between the two PIs I have annoyance free tv. To build the USB drive, I simply Etched the Raspios Buster full image to the drive. No SD Card is used. Jeff's videos are excellent, truly excellent.
Always a big fan of the GTX Corsair. Used it as a macbook bootable Linux for years. Got a second one when it was $30 on sale for 128. Cant beat that value.
Well thought out approach to an important question. I thought I was going crazy when I tried USB boot on flash drives. Everyone was talking about how much better they were than microSD but when I tried it my Pi slowed to a crawl. My microSD in a USB3 adapter blew them all away. Then I got a USB SSD drive and it transformed my Pi. 128GB Silicon Power SSD drives are 17 dollars on Amazon, with a $10 adapter you can fly!
I suspect that the reason that the arcanite worked at an acceptable speed when using random, but not for large files has something to do with it's cache more than it's thermals. I would love to see a retest with the drive shell pulled and some small heat sinks added to it.
I've just been comparing a 128GB USB Pen vs SATA SSD vs M.2 and there's not much difference in the price. Obviously you would need an enclosure but the performance difference is huge. Good video 👍
The Corsair GTX did amazing, WOW! That thing is super cheap compared to NVMe backpack and a new NVMe drive on top of that. I think I might go that way. Screw the expensive stuff.
You could use Pareto for discarding drives that are never a good choice. Basically if A is better that B at all metrics then discard B, for all combinations of A and B. You still end with a set of drives to choose from, you just won't have to waste time with worthless ones.
Wish that I had seen this a week ago before I ordered the 512 GB Sandisk USB3.1 flash drive, spec'd @ 130 MB/s. It only performed @ ~64 MB/s, so I'm returning it to Amazon. WiFi seems to randomly lose connections and/or moving the wireless mouse also causes it, sometimes. I'm guessing that the USB is too slow to handle WiFi buffering during 1080p YT video playback. None of these issues are happening with the USB3.0 to M.2 SSD. Yesterday, I ordered a PNY Flash drive, rated @ 400 MB/s. But, have now jumped over to Amazon, just in time to cancel that order. Whew! Looks like I'll go for the Corsair, if there's a 512GB model. Thanks Jeff!
Thanks, very useful. I would have liked to also see the same testing for an Sandisk Extreme Pro and a Transcend Jetflash 910, and although you may not need the larger capacity, some of these attain higher speeds above a certain amount of memory due to paralleled memory channel access, typically at 128GB or 256GB and higher with current generation flash chips, or lower GB thresholds for older designs using lower density flash chips. Plus even if it has wear leveling, it's nice to have multiple times as much free space to do it if it is to be left running the OS 24/7 for years, especially now that so many flash drives are TLC opposed to MLC based. PS - You never did correct that graph that showed the GbE network transfer speeds impossibly high at over 200MB/s when they should have peaked under 150MB/s.
I would have liked to seen an M.2 Sata solution in there. Also, I would have liked to see the commands used to test, so that I can try it on my RPi as well.
Keep up the great work. I'm actually trying to set up a kubernetes cluster but I wanted something different that sort of clones 2 raspberry pis so they can do failover with normal programs. Is there any way to do that?
I use the Pi as a SAMBA/PLEX server with an ooooold external USB 2.0 HD Drive. I can't afford large sized SSDs yet, so I ordered an UASP-enabled USB 3.0 sata adapter with power supply for regular 3.5 HDDs from AliExpress. Now I just need a decent and large HDD, but that's a buy for another time.
Even a (nice and inexpensive) HDD will get a significant speed up when you use the right enclosure supporting SATA! Good luck, and I hope it's time for that new drive soon :)
Sadly a LOT of people never consider wear when using flash drives / SD cards. If you plan on using the PI for serious daily use, get an external SSD. Either A SATA or M.2 one. This way you have trim support and wear leveling. Your drive will last a LOT longer and be faster than any flash drive could be.
Someone said SanDisk is absolute garbage in terms of speeds, seems like you have proven it. Have ordered m.2 adapter for Pi4 that ETA Prime had made video on, unfortunatelly sold out of amazon already, had to order it from aliexpress.
You are overgeneralizing. Those two particular Sandisks do have poor performance, but pretty much all of the USB-connector-sized flash drives have the same problem of heat density, but on the other hand Sandisk makes one of the fastest USB flash drives too, especially for random IO they have the Extreme Pro. Their larger form factor, budget priced, plastic cased flash drive fall in the middle, not suffering the heat related slowdown from extended writes that the Ultra Fit and Flair do, but nowhere near the random and small write performance of the Extreme Pro, and much lower peak read speeds too.
There was an Adata sold for like a year that was outstanding. Every other USB drive I've tried is worse than Patriot drives from the beginnings of USB 3! Even the same models new!
I own a sandisk ultra fit that I usually carry with me, and it usually gets uncomfortable to the touch just a few seconds after being plugged in. There's also a similar version completely made out of plastic and the reviews complaint a lot about overheating.
Would be interesting to see real performance on actual usecases. Typical it would be really little difference. Like web page load, compiler, graphics filters, or what ever you want to use it for. When I test with various use cases the differences are close to none as it is CPU performance, etc that is the bottleneck.
I didn't go too in depth, but for a good comparison of how much better performance can be for some operations (like launching Chromium and loading a web page), see my NVMe boot video: th-cam.com/video/4Womn10v71s/w-d-xo.html
@@JeffGeerling Hi, my SSD reaches maximum speed of 200mb/s and average read speed of 140mb/s and maximum speed of 140mb/s and average writing speed of 70mb/s it's normal? or is it possible to extract more speed from ssd
I've also been using the Samsung 32G cards for booting RPi and other SBCs. But I've seen multiple comments in the last year or two that the 64G and larger are _much_ faster due to a change in internal architecture. This *might* be related to the "EVO+" vs "EVOPlus" thing, which I've never found a clear explanation of.
you could try the same tests with the WDElements HDD model listed here: storage.jamesachambers.com/hdd/ Its quicker than a lot of SSD, but apparently, "not all Elements are created equal". I use it with a 10Gb swap partition (clipped off the end), the rest is the default format ExFAT, so the files are accessible on any system.
Hi Jeff, are you measuring only USB drive performance, or also the performance of the USB port? It seems to me that with the fastest flash drives that you tested you reached the top speed of the USB port, and cannot go faster than that. So if you test a flash drive that can give you 1000 MB/sec read and write speeds (ie., Kingstone DataTraveler Max flash drive) and you test it on the USB 3.0 port of a Raspberry Pi 4B, you won't get speeds faster than about 340 MB/sec. I think this is the fastest speed the USB port can give you, no matter how good or how fast is the USB flash drive is. Would you agree?
Hello Jeff, thanks for your amazing videos, they really motivate me to buy some PI's and start learning new stuff :). Actually, I'm using punch of Raspberry Pi 4 SBC's to learn KVM, GlusterFS and K8s in future plans, however, I'm running into an issue every time I shutdown the PI's, which is that root portion got corrupted, which is making me re-deploy and repeat the same steps, and honestly, it's really annoying. I did some search and found this issue is common, especially when the PI lost its power unexpectedly. so, my question is, does booting from USB solve the SD Card corruption issue?
I would say yes, because there then is not SD Card that can corrupt. Try swapping out the SD Card with a different one or resolve the random power losses. But in the meantime you might already have resolved the issue :)
Thank you very much very the video! Are you able to use the NVME drive without an extra powered usb-hub? It won't work for me without a powered usb-hub although I'm using the originaly Pi power supply.
Jeff- Were you able to get the XPG drive in the TDBT case to actually boot? I can't seem to get it past the first boot of the OS where it resizes the partition... then it won't come back up. I also notice that it doesn't show up if I plug it in while the pi is booted from the SD card. I've tried both copying the SD card on the Pi and installing a fresh system with Imager from a Mac (which works fine) but then hangs up on the boot. I've got a 3.0 amp power supply, but could that be the issue? Any other thoughts or processes?
4 ปีที่แล้ว
Hey, I got the same combo as you and surprisingly with the same results, were you able to boot and if so how you did it? Thanks in advance
Nice work Jeff! This is really useful information and puts these devices into perspective. Question: Do you know if trim is working on these devices? In particular I am interested in the Corsair GTX since this seems to be the crossover from the SSD/NVMe mass storage devices that almost certainly do support trim and the more pocket portable lot. ‘Trim’ of course is important for the long term speed of these devices.
NVMe SSD out performs USB Flash drives because of two major differences: 1. Embedded memory controller and 2. Parallel NAND chips. The USB drive has to utilize the CPU of the device it is attached to for moving data. The SSD has its own CPU to move the data, which is why it gets hot.
I use the (physically) Larger Sandisk with a 128GB as a Windows Boot drive an it works pretty well for the ~18€ I payed. Maybe the larger Sticks contain multiple flash chips wich could boost performance, or I just got another Hardware-Revision than you. Anyways, I read somewhere that SD-Cards or horrrible at rewriting stuff. They are supposed to break after only a few rewrites.
Hi @Jeff, I have both the RPi 4 and my computer connected to a Gigabit router and I'm uploading a 4GB test file from the computer to the RPi' SSD via SSH at roughly 12 MB/s (byte). The SSD is connected to the USB 3 via a StarTech USB3S2SAT3CB cable. A friend of mine has a very similar issue getting a little better, roughly 15 MB/s. Same USB/SATA cable different SSD (Corsair MX500 1TB). Doing "dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test bs=4M count=1K" on the RPi's ext4 SSD reports around 210 MB/s. Thoughts?
For me ssd didn't work as a boot drive. Tried 2 different ssd, one of them samsung. So I m looking for a USB drive or microsd drive that would be comparable with ssd. So that I could boot and do simple tasks in the os.
thanks for your time and expertise Jeff, i got here looking to see if any of your contenders would suit my pi zero for ram expansion as i have seen other video by other youtubers but dont really talk about the zero as it is the one out of the entire pi line up who would need the ram expansion. Care to comment on this Jeff?
Hi Jeff great stuff ! Jeff, when you talk about net copy it says MB/s at the lower bottom. I assume you wanted to use Mbit/sec since beyond 110 MB/s would not be possible by the limitation of the ethernet itself. Or am I missing something ?
The metal cased external SSD drives like the Samsung T5/T7 or the Sandisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD are also interesting to test. I would expect the Sandisk to suffer from heat-related slowdown more than the Samsungs. That is just a case difference. On balance, the somewhat soft cased Sandisk is more likely to survive being dropped than the metal-cased drives.
I'd expect it not to matter on either because the surface area of both is already sufficient. It's not a matter of cooler being better until a thermal threshold is exceeded, rather just that it stays cool ENOUGH.
@@stinkycheese804 I dare not use either of your names by way of a polite start to this!!!! How can I call someone I do not know "stinky"? Or even "cheese"?? :-) In general use yes there is sufficient area, but there are still some issues. When SSDs have been subjected to large writes they do overheat, be they internal or external, and slow down drastically. For me that is an issue because I use them to hold video files, or (less often) to take back-ups and transferring large volumes to them gets into that thermal region. But I do not want to overstate the issue of the case itself; because I have seen what is inside some drives, and it is rare for the chips to be properly connected to the external case, no matter what the case is made of. The air gap is then at least as much of a problem as the case area. I would think there is a market for a well-made external SSD with proper thermal connection to a strongly ribbed external case aimed at the sustained write use model. I would certainly buy a few. It gets down to how well such a drive can be demonstrated to do a significantly better job. How many sales people or outlets can have this sort of discussion to justify the sales of what will most likely be more expensive per GB?
Important question for a newbee... Let's say I take a 256GB MicroSD card and flash Raspberry Pi OS onto it to use as my Linux OS on my R-Pi and insert it into the proper slot and boot. Knowing that the Raspberry Pi OS is only 4GB, will the remaining remaining space on that MicroSD card be utilized as sort of an SSD for all other data I may wish to load so long as I don't try to go beyond capacity?
The first time the Pi boots, if you just flashed the OS to a new drive, the Pi will resize the partition to fill up the rest of the free space. If that ever doesn't happen for some reason, you can also manually kick it off from 'sudo raspi-config'.
Comprehensive, clear and most importantly: task-oriented benchmarking
Thank you for this video. I'm a 42-year IT veteran, and have a BSEE I earned before the age of ICs. I thought your presentation was beautiful: succinct and accurate to every detail; your range of tests was well thought-out (heat being the sworn enemy of all electronic circuits); and the comparisons were exquisite -- perfect for somebody who cares about maximizing their < $100 USD. If all your vids are this good, I'm going to watch all of them. I'm subbed, BTW -- *good job!*
My goal was to use the PI 4 as a browser with a big screen tv to replace an older ROKU. Using an SD Card, the PI 4 chromium browser performance was unacceptable, but with a USB 2.0 drive, it worked just fine using the standard chromium browser. Ublock blocks ads & my second PI 4 serves as a DNS filter so between the two PIs I have annoyance free tv. To build the USB drive, I simply Etched the Raspios Buster full image to the drive. No SD Card is used. Jeff's videos are excellent, truly excellent.
Always a big fan of the GTX Corsair. Used it as a macbook bootable Linux for years. Got a second one when it was $30 on sale for 128. Cant beat that value.
Thanks a lot Jeff for the review.. was looking into this storage options!
You are a gift to raspberry pi enthusiasts! Thank you for this excellent video!
Well thought out approach to an important question. I thought I was going crazy when I tried USB boot on flash drives. Everyone was talking about how much better they were than microSD but when I tried it my Pi slowed to a crawl. My microSD in a USB3 adapter blew them all away. Then I got a USB SSD drive and it transformed my Pi. 128GB Silicon Power SSD drives are 17 dollars on Amazon, with a $10 adapter you can fly!
I suspect that the reason that the arcanite worked at an acceptable speed when using random, but not for large files has something to do with it's cache more than it's thermals. I would love to see a retest with the drive shell pulled and some small heat sinks added to it.
That's... not a bad suggestion!
@@JeffGeerling It would be interesting.
I've just been comparing a 128GB USB Pen vs SATA SSD vs M.2 and there's not much difference in the price. Obviously you would need an enclosure but the performance difference is huge. Good video 👍
Love your videos bro! Thank you for the information in a completely mellow presentation!
Great video as always!
Thanks for the test and the clear graphs, kudos, well done!
I love this guy. I think the secret is getting out, though. He’s now topped 50K subscribers.
Brutal, estaba esperando tu video! i was waiting your video, thanks a lot!
Grande Arturo 😅💪
@@yefersonrojas6614 🙋🏼♂️🤙🏻
The Corsair GTX did amazing, WOW! That thing is super cheap compared to NVMe backpack and a new NVMe drive on top of that.
I think I might go that way. Screw the expensive stuff.
The pic of the astronaut with the gun in space 😂😂😭😭 Not sure how many other people actually got that joke! Hilarious!!!
You could use Pareto for discarding drives that are never a good choice. Basically if A is better that B at all metrics then discard B, for all combinations of A and B. You still end with a set of drives to choose from, you just won't have to waste time with worthless ones.
Excellent testing and comparison. Thank you!
Wish that I had seen this a week ago before I ordered the 512 GB Sandisk USB3.1 flash drive, spec'd @ 130 MB/s. It only performed @ ~64 MB/s, so I'm returning it to Amazon. WiFi seems to randomly lose connections and/or moving the wireless mouse also causes it, sometimes. I'm guessing that the USB is too slow to handle WiFi buffering during 1080p YT video playback. None of these issues are happening with the USB3.0 to M.2 SSD.
Yesterday, I ordered a PNY Flash drive, rated @ 400 MB/s. But, have now jumped over to Amazon, just in time to cancel that order. Whew!
Looks like I'll go for the Corsair, if there's a 512GB model. Thanks Jeff!
this videos are so usefull !!!
thank's!
Thanks, very useful. I would have liked to also see the same testing for an Sandisk Extreme Pro and a Transcend Jetflash 910, and although you may not need the larger capacity, some of these attain higher speeds above a certain amount of memory due to paralleled memory channel access, typically at 128GB or 256GB and higher with current generation flash chips, or lower GB thresholds for older designs using lower density flash chips.
Plus even if it has wear leveling, it's nice to have multiple times as much free space to do it if it is to be left running the OS 24/7 for years, especially now that so many flash drives are TLC opposed to MLC based.
PS - You never did correct that graph that showed the GbE network transfer speeds impossibly high at over 200MB/s when they should have peaked under 150MB/s.
The Transcend ESD310C or ESD300 are SSDs in a USB flash drive form factor and would be a good alternative for the Corsair GTX.
I would have liked to seen an M.2 Sata solution in there. Also, I would have liked to see the commands used to test, so that I can try it on my RPi as well.
Keep up the great work. I'm actually trying to set up a kubernetes cluster but I wanted something different that sort of clones 2 raspberry pis so they can do failover with normal programs. Is there any way to do that?
The Fideco M203CP enclosure for M.2 NVME drives works extremely well with Pi 4 on USB 3 FYI
I use the Pi as a SAMBA/PLEX server with an ooooold external USB 2.0 HD Drive. I can't afford large sized SSDs yet, so I ordered an UASP-enabled USB 3.0 sata adapter with power supply for regular 3.5 HDDs from AliExpress. Now I just need a decent and large HDD, but that's a buy for another time.
Even a (nice and inexpensive) HDD will get a significant speed up when you use the right enclosure supporting SATA! Good luck, and I hope it's time for that new drive soon :)
Did you take drive wear into consideration?
In my experience, most USB-drives decline in performance over time.
Sadly a LOT of people never consider wear when using flash drives / SD cards. If you plan on using the PI for serious daily use, get an external SSD. Either A SATA or M.2 one. This way you have trim support and wear leveling. Your drive will last a LOT longer and be faster than any flash drive could be.
Perfect video. Many thanks!!!
Fantastic video. well done.
Thank you Jeff. Looks like my Samsung FIT USB3 flash drive isn't very fast at all.
I also use SanDisk ultra flair and I know the heating issue, so I use heatsink on ultra flair
Someone said SanDisk is absolute garbage in terms of speeds, seems like you have proven it.
Have ordered m.2 adapter for Pi4 that ETA Prime had made video on, unfortunatelly sold out of amazon already, had to order it from aliexpress.
You are overgeneralizing. Those two particular Sandisks do have poor performance, but pretty much all of the USB-connector-sized flash drives have the same problem of heat density, but on the other hand Sandisk makes one of the fastest USB flash drives too, especially for random IO they have the Extreme Pro. Their larger form factor, budget priced, plastic cased flash drive fall in the middle, not suffering the heat related slowdown from extended writes that the Ultra Fit and Flair do, but nowhere near the random and small write performance of the Extreme Pro, and much lower peak read speeds too.
There was an Adata sold for like a year that was outstanding. Every other USB drive I've tried is worse than Patriot drives from the beginnings of USB 3! Even the same models new!
All well and good but what about a 2.5" hard drive in a usb3 enclosure?
I have a few small hard drives
I own a sandisk ultra fit that I usually carry with me, and it usually gets uncomfortable to the touch just a few seconds after being plugged in. There's also a similar version completely made out of plastic and the reviews complaint a lot about overheating.
Would be interesting to see real performance on actual usecases. Typical it would be really little difference.
Like web page load, compiler, graphics filters, or what ever you want to use it for.
When I test with various use cases the differences are close to none as it is CPU performance, etc that is the bottleneck.
I didn't go too in depth, but for a good comparison of how much better performance can be for some operations (like launching Chromium and loading a web page), see my NVMe boot video: th-cam.com/video/4Womn10v71s/w-d-xo.html
@@JeffGeerling Hi, my SSD reaches maximum speed of 200mb/s and average read speed of 140mb/s and maximum speed of 140mb/s and average writing speed of 70mb/s it's normal? or is it possible to extract more speed from ssd
I've also been using the Samsung 32G cards for booting RPi and other SBCs. But I've seen multiple comments in the last year or two that the 64G and larger are _much_ faster due to a change in internal architecture. This *might* be related to the "EVO+" vs "EVOPlus" thing, which I've never found a clear explanation of.
Corsair GTX is an ssd external hard drive, only smaller. But just that
you forgot to check the power consumption. wich is important for a low power board. any news about flash-drives or sd-cards ?
The Sabrent EC-M2CU enclosure for M.2 SSD does not work correctly with PI4 on USB 3 just USB 2 even after flashing with latest firmware FYI
I'm curious as to why micro sd seems to be the default.
Unexpected Marlon Brando
you could try the same tests with the WDElements HDD model listed here: storage.jamesachambers.com/hdd/
Its quicker than a lot of SSD, but apparently, "not all Elements are created equal". I use it with a 10Gb swap partition (clipped off the end), the rest is the default format ExFAT, so the files are accessible on any system.
Hi Jeff, are you measuring only USB drive performance, or also the performance of the USB port? It seems to me that with the fastest flash drives that you tested you reached the top speed of the USB port, and cannot go faster than that. So if you test a flash drive that can give you 1000 MB/sec read and write speeds (ie., Kingstone DataTraveler Max flash drive) and you test it on the USB 3.0 port of a Raspberry Pi 4B, you won't get speeds faster than about 340 MB/sec. I think this is the fastest speed the USB port can give you, no matter how good or how fast is the USB flash drive is. Would you agree?
Thanks Jeff ,great great ,but what about the rockchip? does a raspberry can boot of a M.2 RK3399?
Hello Jeff, thanks for your amazing videos, they really motivate me to buy some PI's and start learning new stuff :).
Actually, I'm using punch of Raspberry Pi 4 SBC's to learn KVM, GlusterFS and K8s in future plans, however, I'm running into an issue every time I shutdown the PI's, which is that root portion got corrupted, which is making me re-deploy and repeat the same steps, and honestly, it's really annoying. I did some search and found this issue is common, especially when the PI lost its power unexpectedly.
so, my question is, does booting from USB solve the SD Card corruption issue?
I would say yes, because there then is not SD Card that can corrupt. Try swapping out the SD Card with a different one or resolve the random power losses.
But in the meantime you might already have resolved the issue :)
@@RockWolfHD True, the issue resolved..
thanks for your reply anyway :)
After this video I am wondering why there is a Micro SD slot at all on the RPi. It’s not cheap, it’s not fast, it‘s not very reliable.
can the rpi2 model b v1.1 boot from usb drive ?
is a USB3 to SATA adapter cheating?
Curious how these faster drives would effect swap file? I know very little about PIs and have not really messed with Linux at that level.
What about using any of these as a boot drive?
Question. How are you breaking the 110Mb/s of gigabit Ethernet.
Thank you very much very the video! Are you able to use the NVME drive without an extra powered usb-hub? It won't work for me without a powered usb-hub although I'm using the originaly Pi power supply.
4:07 How can the network transfer speed be 232 MB/s? Shouldn't the Pi be capped at 116 MB/s due to its Gigabit Ethernet?
Yeah it doesn't make any sense...
Maybe they were tested on a PC
@@mikolajwojnicki2169 It says Pi 4. If it had been tested on a pc, it would need 2.5 or 10gbit ethernet.
WD_BLACK is amazingly fast
Jeff-
Were you able to get the XPG drive in the TDBT case to actually boot? I can't seem to get it past the first boot of the OS where it resizes the partition... then it won't come back up. I also notice that it doesn't show up if I plug it in while the pi is booted from the SD card. I've tried both copying the SD card on the Pi and installing a fresh system with Imager from a Mac (which works fine) but then hangs up on the boot.
I've got a 3.0 amp power supply, but could that be the issue? Any other thoughts or processes?
Hey, I got the same combo as you and surprisingly with the same results, were you able to boot and if so how you did it? Thanks in advance
I just bought that combo and cannot get it to boot, either. Any solution? Thanks!
👍👍👍👍
Please don’t make the open mouth soy boy nu male face in your Thumbnails otherwise I’ll have to unsubscribe
FIRST!! Sorry I had to. It’s the first time I’ve ever done this, I promise
iam asking myself, why raspberry not start creating at least an internal usb-port with another 4-times-usb-controller or an 4x usb3.1 controller ...
I have a 128gb Ultra Fit, and it gets superhot, superfast, no matter what I've plugged it into.
Did you check the difference between DRAM and DRAM-less SSDs ?
So, I guess you're not a great admirer of Richard Dawkins.
@jeff geerling earlier in his youtube videos "i am not a raspberry pi youtube channel" now "actually i am kinda one"
"You Become the Thing You Hate"
Very cleaver approach, usefull for me. Thank you!
Nice work Jeff! This is really useful information and puts these devices into perspective. Question: Do you know if trim is working on these devices? In particular I am interested in the Corsair GTX since this seems to be the crossover from the SSD/NVMe mass storage devices that almost certainly do support trim and the more pocket portable lot. ‘Trim’ of course is important for the long term speed of these devices.
I'm going to be investigating that in a follow-up. I completely forgot to test for TRIM and UASP support, and to benchmark boot times.
The price per IO operation is awesome, thank you Jeff!
This needed a Mushkin Ventura 🥺
NVMe SSD out performs USB Flash drives because of two major differences: 1. Embedded memory controller and 2. Parallel NAND chips. The USB drive has to utilize the CPU of the device it is attached to for moving data. The SSD has its own CPU to move the data, which is why it gets hot.
I use the (physically) Larger Sandisk with a 128GB as a Windows Boot drive an it works pretty well for the ~18€ I payed. Maybe the larger Sticks contain multiple flash chips wich could boost performance, or I just got another Hardware-Revision than you. Anyways, I read somewhere that SD-Cards or horrrible at rewriting stuff. They are supposed to break after only a few rewrites.
Hi @Jeff, I have both the RPi 4 and my computer connected to a Gigabit router and I'm uploading a 4GB test file from the computer to the RPi' SSD via SSH at roughly 12 MB/s (byte). The SSD is connected to the USB 3 via a StarTech USB3S2SAT3CB cable.
A friend of mine has a very similar issue getting a little better, roughly 15 MB/s. Same USB/SATA cable different SSD (Corsair MX500 1TB).
Doing "dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test bs=4M count=1K" on the RPi's ext4 SSD reports around 210 MB/s. Thoughts?
For me ssd didn't work as a boot drive. Tried 2 different ssd, one of them samsung. So I m looking for a USB drive or microsd drive that would be comparable with ssd. So that I could boot and do simple tasks in the os.
Thank you Jeff
Samsung FIT or BAR flash drives do around 12MB/s random 4k.
thanks for your time and expertise Jeff, i got here looking to see if any of your contenders would suit my pi zero for ram expansion as i have seen other video by other youtubers but dont really talk about the zero as it is the one out of the entire pi line up who would need the ram expansion. Care to comment on this Jeff?
I have one of those GTX drives with the 3.1 interface, insanely fast. Expensive as hell but a great drive.
I got the UltraFit which is pretty fast and has small footprint
Hi Jeff great stuff !
Jeff, when you talk about net copy it says MB/s at the lower bottom. I assume you wanted to use Mbit/sec since beyond 110 MB/s would not be possible by the limitation of the ethernet itself. Or am I missing something ?
Yes, oops! That graph's legend is quite incorrect... I think I messed it up when I was tweaking it for the video, and it's wrong in my blog post too!
The metal cased external SSD drives like the Samsung T5/T7 or the Sandisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD are also interesting to test. I would expect the Sandisk to suffer from heat-related slowdown more than the Samsungs. That is just a case difference.
On balance, the somewhat soft cased Sandisk is more likely to survive being dropped than the metal-cased drives.
I'd expect it not to matter on either because the surface area of both is already sufficient. It's not a matter of cooler being better until a thermal threshold is exceeded, rather just that it stays cool ENOUGH.
@@stinkycheese804 I dare not use either of your names by way of a polite start to this!!!! How can I call someone I do not know "stinky"? Or even "cheese"?? :-)
In general use yes there is sufficient area, but there are still some issues.
When SSDs have been subjected to large writes they do overheat, be they internal or external, and slow down drastically. For me that is an issue because I use them to hold video files, or (less often) to take back-ups and transferring large volumes to them gets into that thermal region.
But I do not want to overstate the issue of the case itself; because I have seen what is inside some drives, and it is rare for the chips to be properly connected to the external case, no matter what the case is made of. The air gap is then at least as much of a problem as the case area.
I would think there is a market for a well-made external SSD with proper thermal connection to a strongly ribbed external case aimed at the sustained write use model. I would certainly buy a few. It gets down to how well such a drive can be demonstrated to do a significantly better job. How many sales people or outlets can have this sort of discussion to justify the sales of what will most likely be more expensive per GB?
Important question for a newbee... Let's say I take a 256GB MicroSD card and flash Raspberry Pi OS onto it to use as my Linux OS on my R-Pi and insert it into the proper slot and boot. Knowing that the Raspberry Pi OS is only 4GB, will the remaining remaining space on that MicroSD card be utilized as sort of an SSD for all other data I may wish to load so long as I don't try to go beyond capacity?
The first time the Pi boots, if you just flashed the OS to a new drive, the Pi will resize the partition to fill up the rest of the free space. If that ever doesn't happen for some reason, you can also manually kick it off from 'sudo raspi-config'.
@@JeffGeerling So the MicroSD will not be used for anything else but the OS?
@@CharlesHuse You can store whatever programs and files you download on your Pi
I thought the point of moving away from microSD cards is that they’re not fast or reliable enough?