

- #CHEAP EXTERNAL SSD DRIVES HOW TO#
- #CHEAP EXTERNAL SSD DRIVES UPGRADE#
- #CHEAP EXTERNAL SSD DRIVES PRO#
This is different than a typical “flash drive” which uses extremely cheap memory and has very low random I/O performance/throughput compared to a real solid state drive.
#CHEAP EXTERNAL SSD DRIVES PRO#
The SanDisk Extreme Pro USB SSD is a true solid state drive. These eliminate having any extra cables as they plug directly into the USB slot. If you move your Pi around a lot or need something more compact there are a couple of options. Be careful with enclosures as they tend to take a bit more power (especially for NVMe, see “Power Requirements” section below). There is no power adapter needed as 2.5″ SSDs using adapters are low power and are powered by the Pi through USB. The 2.5″ SATA to USB adapter above allows us to connect a drive like this to our Pi using USB. These two adapter variants are my go to adapters for all my Pi related projects that need a fast and easy 2.5″ SATA SSD! I later bought the 3.1 variant and had the same positive experience. I’ve used the 3.0 variant with my Pi 4 since launch and it has always worked well. Which SSD to Buy?īoth the USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 variants of the StarTech 2.5″ SATA adapter work well with the Pi 4. Much of the throughput and other performance differences in the above chart are because of much better and faster read/write caching.
#CHEAP EXTERNAL SSD DRIVES HOW TO#
This lets your Raspberry Pi push data to the drive and start doing other things and let the drive itself figure out how to organize the data. Solid state drives also have very large write caches. This is because SSDs are so fast that they are limited by the speed of the Raspberry Pi’s USB 2.0 ports. But even the very best and most expensive MicroSD cards got absolutely destroyed by even the cheapest solid state drives. MicroSD performance varied wildly based on quality of the card. Further, solid state drives beat the fastest MicroSD cards by about 300%.

Click here to see benchmark results.Īs you can see all of the top spots in the results are held by solid state drives. To show you the difference in performance I have developed a benchmark that anyone can run and uploads the results to the site. Almost every action you take and even routine log file updates trigger these updates so they are very important for performance. These are small writes throughout a disk and consist of about 25% of all hard drive activity on a computer. They’re very good at this and some cards have excellent throughput fast enough to even record 4K video.īut one thing they are not good at is 4k random writes and rewrites. They are designed for devices such as cameras and smart phones that need to write and reliably store data. MicroSD cards were not designed to serve as living storage for operating systems.
#CHEAP EXTERNAL SSD DRIVES UPGRADE#
With 10x the performance of MicroSD cards they are now a no-brainer upgrade for servers or IO intensive Raspberry Pi projects. Thanks to technologies such as 3D NAND flash solid state drives for consumers have now become cheaper than mid-high range MicroSD cards.
