![]() ![]() Since then, we have had various leading vendors come out with their own solutions for this market segment. Last year, we took a look at a couple of NVMe to USB 3.2 Gen 2 enclosures from MyDigitalSSD and Plugable. Traditional SATA SSDs (saturating at 560 MBps) can hardly take full advantage of thebandwidth offered by USB 3.2 Gen 2. High-performance external storage devices use either Thunderbolt 3 or USB 3.2 Gen 2 for the host interface. Read on for a detailed review of the various high-speed external SSDs targeting the mainstream market. While those speeds can be achieved with Thunderbolt 3, mass-market devices have to rely on USB. Thanks to rapid advancements in flash technology (including the advent of 3D NAND and NVMe) as well as faster host interfaces (such as Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.x), we now have palm-sized flash-based storage devices capable of delivering 2GBps+ speeds. Hopefully, at some point, we’ll find a USB flash drive that offers both affordability and performance for the Pi, but right now, we don’t think any exists.External bus-powered storage devices have grown both in storage capacity as well as speeds over the last decade. So, for now, my advice is to get an external SSD for your Raspberry Pi only if you are planning to use it as a file or web server and you can afford the premium. We’d like to see an affordable Flash drive that’s designed to work well on the Pi, but absent that, you’ll likely spend well over $100 purchasing both an M.2-to-USB 3.0 enclosure and the associated SSD. But, according to our tests, there are also a lot of scenarios, like streaming video, surfing the web or transcoding media, where having an SSD doesn’t help.Īnd, if you get a USB Flash Drive - unless it is one that has particularly high random read and random write numbers (two things not in a spec sheet) - you’ll actually have a far more sluggish computer than if you just stick with a plain old microSD card. The Bottom LineĪdding a powerful, external SSD to your Raspberry Pi 4 B can boost performance in certain areas, most notably application load times and web / file serving. There was no difference at all between the different storage types. LAME MP3 Encoding Test on Raspberry Pi 4 with and without SSDĮncoding MP3 files with LAME was a similar experience. The SSD was usually 2 to 4 times faster than a microSD card and as much as 13 times quicker when dealing with large, sequential reads or writes. IOzone’s synthetic results confirmed what we found through regular use. Blocks on the lower end of the spectrum, particularly during random reads and writes, represent the most common use case for opening and using apps, while the higher block sizes are good for saving or copying large files. We performed our tests using a 100MB storage file and found the most interesting results with the 4K, 512K, 1024K and 16,384K (highest) block sizes. The Linux equivalent of Crystal Disk Mark, IOzone, is a synthetic test that gives you sequential and random reads and writes. IOzone File Transfers: 2 to 4 Times the Speed Very often just opening the start menu was laggy, with submenus taking seconds to appear. Running core parts of the OS off of our USB Flash drive was an exercise in frustration and sluggishness. It’s hard to put a number against the feeling of responsiveness in an OS, but you know it when you see it and notice even more when you don’t see it. ![]() I was surprised to see how well the Flash drive did here, considering how poorly it performed everywhere else. However, the margin of difference here is very slight and non-existent for the 3 B+. ![]() Perhaps it’s no surprise that having faster storage would allow you to gather and send more data from the server to the client. Apache Web Service Test with Pi 4 and SSD ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |