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Upgrade Raspberry Pi 4 with a NVMe boot drive

alexellisuk.medium.com

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Re: Upgrade Raspberry Pi 4 with a NVMe boot drive

#51

Post by charwalker »

onli wrote: post #40
melvyn2 wrote: post #32

This part is strange: "NVMe drive — an M.2 SSD looks almost identical, but has two notches instead of one. Generally an SSD will perform to the tune of hundreds of MB/s instead of thousands." First, both are SSDs, so I don't know what he is trying to compare. Both use M.2, but different keys from the sounds of it (the "notches"). M.2 drives can be either SATA or NVME, but it is harder to come across a SATA M.2 drive…

There are some M.2 SATA SSDs around that get regularly confused with NVMe SSDs. He for sure wanted to warn against SATA SSDs. Though for the Pi a SATA SSD would be fast enough.

And likely even a Pi4 couldn't take full advantage of an NVME drive except in specific workloads or setups. I'd use a SATA M.2 if needed to save 40% of the cost on the same size SSD. Or just a random thumb drive I have around.

The Pi4 compute unit has a PCIe x1 slot, I think, and that could better put an NVME drive to use. But at that cost, for the drive and Pi, I don't see it being widely used outside of hobby or home use.

I'm excited about this and how the official Pi4 firmware now supports USB boot. Maybe if you used the Pi to run a NAS and wanted the NVME drive as accelerated cache (it can do H.265, 4kp60 decode, and H.264)?

But can a Pi even process an NVME drives bandwidth via it's CPU/etc or Gigabit Ethernet/USB 3.0/GPIO add on?

Edit: This guide is basically 1. Put SSD in adapter and 2. Set up USB boot then clone SD card to SSD. How is this article not just a forum post like the dozens of others that provide the same information and process?

Re: Upgrade Raspberry Pi 4 with a NVMe boot drive

#52

Post by jasonjayr »

onli wrote: post #40
melvyn2 wrote: post #32

This part is strange: "NVMe drive — an M.2 SSD looks almost identical, but has two notches instead of one. Generally an SSD will perform to the tune of hundreds of MB/s instead of thousands." First, both are SSDs, so I don't know what he is trying to compare. Both use M.2, but different keys from the sounds of it (the "notches"). M.2 drives can be either SATA or NVME, but it is harder to come across a SATA M.2 drive…

There are some M.2 SATA SSDs around that get regularly confused with NVMe SSDs. He for sure wanted to warn against SATA SSDs. Though for the Pi a SATA SSD would be fast enough.

Often, most parts will just plain fail to fit, and fit exactly one way.

But the keys for the different type of M.2 slots are not large enough on M.2 SATA vs M.2 SSD to prevent them from mixing up. It's easy to force, and forcing it will be fatal for the device.

I know this from an expensive lesson I learned, long ago :(

Re: Upgrade Raspberry Pi 4 with a NVMe boot drive

#53

Post by protoman3000 »

Another neat trick is to use the 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 and load the whole OS into the RAM at boot time. This makes booting take much longer but after that the system runs very fast and responsive.

Of course eventually the logs will eat everything to you have to write back to USB or SD from time to time.

Re: Upgrade Raspberry Pi 4 with a NVMe boot drive

#56

Post by sp332 »

lxe wrote: post #28
kzrdude wrote: post #23

One needs to login to read. I'm sorry, medium is not a very charitable blog host, and will cost the blog a large part of its audience with these new rules, unfortunately.

I'm getting pretty irritated that the Web is inundated with Medium. It used to be just a nice blog host, and now I don't even know what it is. Glad Substack is picking up steam.

You know Substack has paid subscriptions too, right?

Re: Upgrade Raspberry Pi 4 with a NVMe boot drive

#57

Post by ascagnel_ »

onli wrote: post #40
melvyn2 wrote: post #32

This part is strange: "NVMe drive — an M.2 SSD looks almost identical, but has two notches instead of one. Generally an SSD will perform to the tune of hundreds of MB/s instead of thousands." First, both are SSDs, so I don't know what he is trying to compare. Both use M.2, but different keys from the sounds of it (the "notches"). M.2 drives can be either SATA or NVME, but it is harder to come across a SATA M.2 drive…

There are some M.2 SATA SSDs around that get regularly confused with NVMe SSDs. He for sure wanted to warn against SATA SSDs. Though for the Pi a SATA SSD would be fast enough.

For what it’s worth, unless you’re somehow able to dedicate a PCI-E lane to a USB port, the USB spec will be what limits you. I switched a Pi4 to boot from an older, spare USB SATA SSD a few weeks ago, and it’s reporting 1566MB/924MB on the same hdparm tests as the article (about a 10% drop-off).

Re: Upgrade Raspberry Pi 4 with a NVMe boot drive

#58

Post by Lukas_Skywalker »

kzrdude wrote: post #23

One needs to login to read. I'm sorry, medium is not a very charitable blog host, and will cost the blog a large part of its audience with these new rules, unfortunately.

The Medium Unlimited browser addon works pretty well: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/medium-unlimited...

Re: Upgrade Raspberry Pi 4 with a NVMe boot drive

#59

Post by ascagnel_ »

miahi wrote: post #35
rwmj wrote: post #4

This is just plugging in NVMe over the USB 3 port? I was expecting this to be soldering something to PCIe lanes coming out of the SoC. Is this going to be any better than using an SSD with UAS which is what I'm doing already? ( https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2020/09/24/raspberry-pi-4-running... )

I don't see how a Pi can take advantage of NVMe. From my tests using a 10Gbit USB3 adapter with a capable NVMe drive (3GB/s), its impressive IOPs are reduced so much that they are almost comparable to a 'normal' SATA. I would expect a 5Gbit USB to further limit it.

I have a “normal” SATA SSD plugged in, and it’s running within 10% of the hdparm benchmark in the article (it’s not a 1:1 comparison since it’s an older SSD, cheap adapter, and I have two other HDDs plugged in via USB for bulk storage). At that speed, with those other variables, I think it’s the USB port that’s the bottleneck.
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