12 ms·

UASP makes Raspberry Pi 4 disk IO 50% faster

489 points by geerlingguy 6y ago

Ijumfs 6y ago
The Pi 4 is a big revolution, fast enough to serve as a desktop computer for most office people, students, and so on. It's pretty impressive and more attention is being paid to it as a first-class computing platform as time goes on. Our desktop monoculture has led to serious security problems and massive stagnation at least until recently. Even if you don't use a Pi you should be thankful that they exist.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  The CPU is now (IMHO) the major sticking point for many of my own use cases. It would also be nice to have an easier / less cumbersome way to connect higher speed storage. (The mess of cabling you get with an add-on USB 3.0 drive is annoying.)
  - tlrobinson 6y ago
    > The mess of cabling you get with an add-on USB 3.0 drive is annoying I’m surprised there’s no Raspberry Pi case with a slot for a 2.5” drive and integrated USB 3.0 SATA controller.
    - Zenst 6y ago
      there are, can even make your own. One quick example https://www.amazon.co.uk/MakerHawk-Upgrated-Raspberry-2-5-Inch-Expansion/dp/B077JK3TYZ https://www.amazon.co.uk/MakerHawk-Upgrated-Raspberry-2-5-In...
    - geerlingguy 6y ago
      There are a few, and they're not too bad, but it's still something that would be neatly solved with an option of a PCIe slot or even onboard eMMC like on the compute module (assuming the eMMC or built-in NVMe was much faster than the one on CM3+ and below).
    - gerdesj 6y ago
      I've just bought a Pi4, 7" touchscreen and a case that takes the lot. I have converted the thing to boot and run off a USB3 stick and it runs rather faster than off the SD card. I'm not too bothered about trying to turn it into a NUC. Nowadays I see a Pi as a kiosk style machine with extras. It is what it is. It is a fantastic jack of all trades. You get loads of GPIO of all sorts, bluetooth, wifi, ethernet, USB2 and 3, a quad core CPU and 2-8GB RAM. Two HDMI ports and a GPU. It's too much for jobs that you would deploy an ESP8266 or ESP32 and it's not enough for a full on desktop replacement. I can't see a need for more than 16 or 32GB of storage on one of these things. If your use case needs greater storage then it probably needs more "box" or I simply lack imagination. I have a C-64 under the telly in the sitting room (it has a QSII joystick and a USB interface). I have a ZX81 with 3" of rather stiff Blutac holding the 16Kb RAM expansion steady and a keyboard on a ribbon. Sometimes I go back to school and type in definitions for 8x8 blocks and make them run around the screen. I do not own a Sinclair C5, that would be silly. Mess of cabling: lol!
      - JohnBooty 6y ago
        I can't see a need for more than 16 or 32GB of storage on one of these things. If your use case needs greater storage then it probably needs more "box" or I simply lack imagination. Generally yeah. One possible (slightly contrived) exception that comes to mind could be using it as "dumb" volatile storage like Redis/memcached/etc. I say "dumb" because if you are leaning into any of Redis' more advanced stuff (sorted sets, pub/sub, whatever else they've thrown in lately) I suspect CPU would tend to become a bottleneck rather quickly once you've got > 8GB of data.
      - burfog 6y ago
        It's terrible that 2-8GB RAM is not enough for a full on desktop replacement. You could run Windows 95 in 4 MB. Was that not a desktop? The original Mac was just 128 KB. Suppose it was all for graphics. Scaling up for modern color depth and screen size, we should need about 400 MB for the Windows 95 level of efficiency, or about 64 MB for Mac level of efficiency. That's a huge overestimate because RAM is not all consumed by graphics. In other words, modern software can't run a desktop properly without even 10 to 100 times as much RAM as it ought to need.
    - rcarmo 6y ago
      NVME hanging off the USB bus would be nicer and more compact.
  - pedrocr 6y ago
    At that point you probably want a NUC style computer like the Lenovo M75q. Up to 4 core 8 thread, 32GB+ RAM (two slots), AMD graphics and an M.2 slot. https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkCentre/ThinkCentre_M75q_Tiny/ThinkCentre_M75q_Tiny_Spec.pdf https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkCentre/ThinkCe...
    - nerdbeere 6y ago
      Also noteworthy is the upcoming ASUS PN 50 with the new Ryzen Renoir CPUs with up to 8 cores and 64GB RAM. When this will be available in Europe I’ll get that to replace my MacBook for a developer machine. https://liliputing.com/2020/06/asus-pn50-is-a-mini-pc-with-up-to-an-amd-ryzen-7-4800u-processor.html https://liliputing.com/2020/06/asus-pn50-is-a-mini-pc-with-u...
      - vondur 6y ago
        The 8 core 16 thread version looks very promising. Wonder what the prices will be?
      - drcross 6y ago
        x64 doesnt excite me as much as Arm does at the moment, for power draw.
    - thebruce87m 6y ago
      The DeskMini series has two M.2 slots AND two 2.5” slots in a tiny enclosure. Here’s mine: Noctua NH-L9A-AM4, 37mm Premium Low-profile CPU Cooler for AMD AM4 (Brown) £36.17 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/Noctua-NH-L9A-AM4-Premium-Low-profile-Cooler/dp/B075SG1T3X https://www.amazon.co.uk/Noctua-NH-L9A-AM4-Premium-Low-profi... ASRock USB 2.0 Header to 2 x USB 2.0 Cable for DeskMini Series Chassis £10.93 Incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Cable-Deskmini-Mini-Stx-Chassis/dp/B01N8ZNJ3U/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=asrock+usb&qid=1571139456&s=computers&sr=1-4 https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Cable-Deskmini-Mini-Stx-Chas... AMD Ryzen 5 3400G Processor (4C/8T, 6MB cache, 4.2GHz Max Boost) with Radeon™ RX Vega 11 Graphics £139.99 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07SXNDKNM/?tag=pcp0f-21 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07SXNDKNM/?tag=pcp0f-21 Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 Internal SSD High Performance Solid State Drive (SB-ROCKET-1TB) £109.99 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07LGF54XR/?tag=pcp0f-21&th=1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07LGF54XR/?tag=pcp0f-21&th=1 ASRock DeskMini A300 Mini PC Barebone for Socket AM4 £146.94 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07P9GL1LN/?tag=pcp0f-21 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07P9GL1LN/?tag=pcp0f-21 ASRock Wi-Fi Kit for DeskMini Series Chassis, includes 2 x Antennas £29.42 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Wi-Fi-DeskMini-Chassis-Antennas/dp/B07PDTNSYS/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=a300+wifi&qid=1570697428&s=computers&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Wi-Fi-DeskMini-Chassis-Anten... 2 x ADATA AD4S2666316G19-S 16GB DDR4 2666 MHz Memory Module - Memory Modules (16GB, 1x 16GB, DDR4, 2666MHz, 260-pin SO-DIMM) 2 x £73.12 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/ADATA-AD4S2666316G19-S-16GB-Memory-Module/dp/B07B61GLP1/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=AD4S2666316G19&qid=1570698649&s=computers&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/ADATA-AD4S2666316G19-S-16GB-Memory-... Price a few months ago - £619.68 Note that you don’t need the noctua fan but the provided fan that comes with the case is a bit whiny.
- Narishma 6y ago
  > The Pi 4 is a big revolution, fast enough to serve as a desktop computer for most office people, students, and so on. Even the Pi 3 was already good enough for most of those use cases. The main exception being browsing modern bloated websites.
  - floatboth 6y ago
    The Cortex-A53 is really weak. I wouldn't want to run an office suite on that either. Oh, and the Pi 3 was VERY limited by RAM. "most office people, students, and so on" pretty much always do browse lots of modern websites, at the same time as running an office suite, audio player, and more stuff. The A72 is really the "minimum viable CPU core" for desktop usage. Anything with less single-core performance is absolute hell and suffering.
    - geerlingguy 6y ago
      The CM 3+ (which is clocked at 1.2 GHz but is same in other ways to the Pi B 3+ which is 1.4 GHz) is less than half as fast as the Pi 4 in most CPU tasks: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-cluster-episode-5-benchmarking-turing-pi https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-cluster-...
    - megous 6y ago
      Not true. I barely notice any difference between my Orange Pi 3 (4x Cortex-A53 @ 1.8GHz) and my Ivy Bridge workstation, when browsing the web, and things like that. I don't run a heavy weight desktop though. The only noticeable thing is some increased latency (mainly due to storage speed limited to 20MiB/s read speeds), but animations and scrolling and basic stuff like that are pretty much smooth. I could easily run the system from USB attached SSD (which can achieve 15-20x the speeds of the SD card), and that would massively improve app startup speeds too. Also video playback sucks, but that's mainly due to software support, not a hardware issue. It's a chip meant for TV boxes after all. I wouldn't use it to compile programs, but office work? I can imagine that easily.
  - miked85 6y ago
    > The main exception being browsing modern bloated websites. So, the most common use case for a desktop computer?
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  It should be and is decent, but when we tried we ran into numerous paper-cuts: - Needed to set up NTP to set the clock, it was always wrong. - It can't power down through software, so you have to shut down and then hit the power switch like it's 1990. - Audio was a mess and had to spend hours researching how to write and edit a bunch of config files to make it predictable. - The weird set up program means you need to do a lot of googling on how to fix issues in a non-standard to linux way. It mostly works however. - Raspbian feels not quite "finished." Was much happier with Ubuntu Mate, as they fixed 99% of the paper cuts like audio already, but it doesn't support the 4 yet. In short, it is a bit too cheap. I would have definitely spent another dollar to see these hardware issues fixed. Or dropped the CPU speed a hundred MHZ, whatever it takes. In the end, a friend gave us a ten-year-old used iMac for free. I installed Ubuntu Mate on it and it had none of the above problems. It's even a touch faster.
  - sgerenser 6y ago
    A touch faster? The slowest 2010 iMac is the 21" with an i3-540 Dual core CPU, Geekbench 4 is 2211 single/4466 multi. The Pi 4 is around 970/2000, less than half the performance. The Pi 4 has come a long way in speed since the lowly original Pi, but its still not even close to a 10 year old desktop PC (or iMac).
    - geerlingguy 6y ago
      More people (even in 2010) used laptops than desktops, and the Pi is in line with the numbers from the cheaper MacBook Airs at the time (I still have one that runs... though it’s getting some weird green lines on the display). But I can say that working on the 2010 MBA is not fun; one of my webcams doesn’t even work with it (choppy at 30p), zoom is... slow at best, and web browsing is a bit choppy even with ad blockers. Even then, it is a smoother overall experience with that hardware and macOS than when I was testing 64-bit Pi OS on the 8 GB Pi 4 a few weeks ago: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-macbook-pro-raspberry-pi-4-8gb-day https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-macbook...
    - mixmastamyk 6y ago
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  I tried to use the pi 4 as a nextcloud server and found it to be unbearably slow. Not sure what caused it but I suspect the sd card speed.
  - swebs 6y ago
    I also had a recent install that was unbearably slow. It turns out that the SD card was corrupted. Raspberry Pi OS comes with a SD card checking utility you can use to check. Replacing it with a new class 10 card made it fast again.
    - sixothree 6y ago
      You can boot from USB now. No need for SD.
    - unicornporn 6y ago
      You should also go for at least Application Performance Class 1.
  - 0ld 6y ago
    browsing media is still unusably slow on usb3 hdd as well. once it starts generating previews, youre done. pre-generating doesnt help much been using it for photo sync only, works fine enough as long as youre not using the web interface
    - delfinom 6y ago
      Did you try it using a UASP USB3 HDD though?
    - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
      That was my issue. Images would take 3-10 seconds to show in the UI. Once I moved to a ryzen 5 server I was seeing everything load like it was local.
- regularfry 6y ago
  For my money they've pushed a fraction too hard on the CPU power. One of the best things for me about the 3 is that you don't need to worry about cooling the way you do with the 4. I get why, there's a huge demand for the 4 to be able to handle proper desktop applications, but I'd love to see a version that has the thermal characteristics of the 3 with the IO updates of the 4.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    I'd actually like a new version of the Compute Module with the PCI-e lanes exposed (the more the better). That would be a real game changer for NAS systems. Or, for both CM and the full RPi, a docking header and a corresponding tiny module for a real-time clock module if not outright embed one. It's 2020 ffs.
  - hajile 6y ago
    It's the price of that ancient 28nm manufacturing.
AnotherGoodName 6y ago
>I found a USB 3.0 SSD was ten times faster than the fastest microSD card I tested I looked it up because i know enough about hardware that this shouldn't be the case (even with a cheap SD Card). Seems it's a limitation of the Pi's SD Card slot. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2018/raspberry-pi-microsd-card-performance-comparison-2018 https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2018/raspberry-pi-microsd-...
- UnlockedSecrets 6y ago
  Note this is only valid for raspberry pi's made before the 4, The 4 includes a much faster SD card slot.
  - mlyle 6y ago
    Note that the testing was done on a Pi 4...
    - UnlockedSecrets 6y ago
      > tested on a Raspberry Pi model 3 B+: No it wasn't.
      - geerlingguy 6y ago
        This one, however, was: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-microsd-card-performance-comparison-2019 https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-microsd-... Even on my Mac (tested with 6 different readers, including one purporting A2 compatibility) the best microSD cards are abysmal for random access. But they do get closer to 90-120 MB/sec for reads, at least. To get advertised speeds on most of the cards, I am guessing you need to work for the SD association's marketing department :D https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-microsd-follow-sd-association-fools-me-twice https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-microsd-...
        kohtatsu 6y ago
floatboth 6y ago
> Without UASP, a drive is mounted as a Mass Storage Device using Bulk Only Transport (or BOT), a protocol that was designed for transferring files way back in the USB 'Full speed' days Wow, holy shit, TIL.. I was always assuming that USB drives were always SCSI — they show up as 'da' (Direct Attach) on FreeBSD after all. Looking at umass driver source: * The driver handles 3 Wire Protocols * - Command/Bulk/Interrupt (CBI) * - Command/Bulk/Interrupt with Command Completion Interrupt (CBI with CCI) * - Mass Storage Bulk-Only (BBB) (BBB refers Bulk/Bulk/Bulk for Command/Data/Status phases) * Over these wire protocols it handles the following command protocols * - SCSI * - UFI (floppy command set) * - 8070i (ATAPI) * UFI and 8070i (ATAPI) are transformed versions of the SCSI command set. Huh, they are pretty much always SCSI, and "bulk only" is (unsurprisingly) only a USB transport level thing that doesn't change the command set. I guess "UASP" is some sort of marketing term for Command/Bulk/Interrupt then..?
- megous 6y ago
  Goals section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Attached_SCSI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Attached_SCSI
  - floatboth 6y ago
    > The native Intel USB3 UASP solution is only supported under Windows 8. To further complicate matters, not all Z77 motherboards support USB3 UASP. A license is required to implement UASP, and not all motherboard manufacturers are prepared to pass on the extra cost of this license to the end user Sounds very cursed. I mean, I'm not a hardware vendor, I should not care, but licensing for something that's just another form of SCSI over USB sounds ridiculous.
- bakul 6y ago
  FreeBSD doesn't support UASP (protocol id 98). AFAIK neither do the other three BSDs.
  - qubex 6y ago
    Kudos for remembering DragonFlyBSD. We’re flattered.
totalZero 6y ago
Friends, I have a question but I don't have a Pi 4 sitting around to test this: Is it possible to run a Pi 4 using UASP if I set it up to boot from a decent (Sandisk/Samsung/etc) USB 3.1 pen drive? Also, is this a reliable setup, or will the device be more stable if booted and run from a MicroSD?
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  I'm going to be testing a few different thumb drives in my next post / video. I have a couple SanDisk models and an Arcanite USB 3.1 drive that I'll be testing... but I don't believe they use UASP (haven't had time to confirm that suspicion yet).
  - Legogris 6y ago
    Thanks Jeff, you’re doing a great service to the community here. I’ve tried to hunt around for a good system drive and fell short so far; support for UASP/TRIM in thumb drives is both rare, and seldom specified by manufacturers even when present. Looks like the only way is to buy a bunch and try.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ehonda 6y ago
  I am not sure about which pen drives support UASP, but one thing of note is they recently updated their firmware (June 15th) to support boot over USB instead of the SD Card. I have mine setup this way now, using an external hard drive enclosure that supports UASP. Works great.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Almost all USB thumb drives are garbage for booting OS because very bad performance for random read/write (Getting worse over time). IIRC SanDisk Extreme Pro is an exception.
bhouston 6y ago
How does a USB 3.x NVMe drive function on the RPi4? I notice those on Amazon as well.
dmitrygr 6y ago
What possible "controller feature" would be needed from the controller on the hardware side to support just another USB protocol?
- kevinoid 6y ago
  I was curious about this as well. The issue appears to be lack of scatter-gather support. See: https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/875#issuecomment-482533041 https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/875#issuecomment...
  - dmitrygr 6y ago
    which is not required to implement any usb protocol. one can easily use normal DMA and still get a speed gain. since the bottleneck is not CPU, making it work a bit harder putting together those DMA descriptors is worth it.
- floatboth 6y ago
  apparently XHCI Streams
justanother 6y ago
Excellent reading this; My Pi4/8GB cluster uses a 1000bT PoE hub for a backplane, and / is an nfsroot from a node running a Sandisk UASP USB3 SSD. Like the author, I'm blown away by the fun to be had with Docker and Kubernetes on this cluster. Unlike the author, I'm having a great experience with it as a Mac-replacing daily driver (thanks mostly to never running chromium on the same node that runs gnome-session, to spread things out a bit). Love to read about everyone's Pi cluster adventures.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  I think I could make it work, but the hindrance to my media (library of 65,000+ RAW photos from three different camera bodies and about 8 TB of 1080p video projects (and counting)) workflows was what really killed it for me. Even basic photo import / adjustments were a pain with any of the applications I tested, and that was partly due to the Pi's slower GPU/CPU, the 64-bit ARM paucity of desktop apps, and the lack of good (read: like Adobe/Apple/pro-tier media apps) UI-based applications on Linux. Most of the other issues (like window management and resolution problems) I ran into with the 'Pi for a Day' project I could probably resolve with a few more days' work.
blattimwind 6y ago
> I used a Satechi USB-C power tester and measured an 8% peak power savings using UASP. That means you'd get 8% more runtime on a battery if you do a lot of file transfers. No no, even better! Peak power consumption is lower, but the same work is completed much more quickly due to increased throughput, so the energy required for the same work is decreased dramatically. Between the performance increase and the lower power usage I wouldn't be surprised if this reduces energy use by 50 %.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  It depends a lot on the workload, though. That kind of statistic is hard to draw any solid conclusions from, except that “it uses less CPU and less overall power during IO activity” and you’ll save some amount of energy consumption (depending on what you’re doing).
- repsilat 6y ago
  Yeah. This kind of savings comes up in interesting places elsewhere -- if you make your algorithm run twice as fast but using twice the memory, your time-integrated memory use (measured in gigabyte seconds) remains the same. So if you can make good use of that memory while your algorithm isn't running, you're saving CPU and not really using more RAM. For something like the Pi this is unlikely, but in data centers with big, latency-insensitive distributed workloads "using memory for less time" can be a real win. (The battery example with the Pi really is the perfect example though, because you're usually interested in the time-integrated value more than the peak draw.)
- asudosandwich 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
TaylorAlexander 6y ago
Well, looks like I need to ditch the SD cards on my Pi4 based robot! Seems like this would improve reliability over SD cards too.
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
I've been using UASP SSD drives in Linux for ~ 5 years, the main issue I face is not performance related but w.r.t monitoring. S.M.A.R.T doesn't behave well with UASP, so not all Smartmontools's feature work[1]. Especially, LifeTime of the SSD don't and they are crucial. I had to resort to calculating remaining life of the SSD manually from the reported lifecycles and negating it with the manufacture's MTBF if they're reported. I've faced this with devices from varying price range [USB 3.0/3.1] - MyDigitalSSD(OTG), Samsung T5, various ORICO USB SSD enclosures with Samsung EVO/Crucial SSDs on host systems of different architectures(x86/ARM). How are you all monitoring the life of your USB SSD on UASP in Linux? [1]https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/USB https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/USB
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  Update: smartctl 6.6 on Ubuntu18.04 Jetson Nano (aarch64) gives Total_LBAs_Written for Samsung 840 Evo in ORICO USB 3.0 SSD enclosure (UASP) and Samsung T5 SSD USB 3.0 but failed to read S.M.A.R.T data properly for MyDigitalSSD(OTG) which is likely the fault of the controller in it. So with Total_LBAs_Written we can find TBW (Total Bytes Written) and compare it with manufacturer's data[1]. [1]https://www.virten.net/2016/12/ssd-total-bytes-written-calculator/ https://www.virten.net/2016/12/ssd-total-bytes-written-calcu...
- elFarto 6y ago
  I have a USB 3.0 Orico enclosure with a Pi4 and I had to pass '-d sat' to smartctl for it to work: smartctl -a -d sat /dev/sda Newer versions of smartmontools shouldn't need it, only the older one that Raspberry PI OS has.
scottlamb 6y ago
But does it work reliably? I have a cheap Inateck dock which does support UASP (the FD2005). Two or three times I had a bunch of errors like these: Sep 22 17:26:01 nuc kernel: sd 4:0:0:1: [sdb] tag#2 uas_eh_abort_handler 0 uas-tag 3 inflight: CMD OUT Sep 22 17:26:01 nuc kernel: sd 4:0:0:1: [sdb] tag#2 CDB: Write(16) 8a 00 00 00 00 01 4d b4 c4 00 00 00 03 b0 00 00 ... Sep 22 17:26:22 nuc kernel: usb 2-3: stat urb: no pending cmd for uas-tag 2 ... Sep 22 17:26:22 nuc kernel: xhci_hcd 0000:00:14.0: ERROR Unknown event condition 34 for slot 3 ep 3 , HC probably busted followed by filesystem corruption. I found other folks complaining about similar problems, eg: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/239782/connection-problem-with-usb3-external-storage-on-linux-uas-driver-problem https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/239782/connection-p... Then I disabled UAS. Haven't had any corruption since. It's not absolute proof, but I believe the firmware and/or driver support for UAS with this dock is buggy, and the older protocol works fine. I like speed as much as the next person, but not if it means repeated filesystem corruption...
- bsder 6y ago
  I'm all for blaming dodgy chipsets, but the Superspeed and Superspeed+ support in Linux definitely has not had all of its rough edges filed off yet either--especially the stuff that uses streams and asynchrony. However, the article comparing to USB 1.1 is silly. If you are on USB 2.0 (and I haven't bumped into anything mass storage in the last 10 years that isn't), the bulk endpoints are quite happy to take advantage of the USB 2.0 bulk packet size (512 bytes) and microframes (120us turnarounds) with 13 packets per microframe. That's going to get you in the 400Mbps+(40Megabytes/sec) range without a lot of problem.
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    That’s still less than half the speed you get from USB 3.0 even without UASP from a cheap SSD. I drew the 1.1 comparison mostly to illustrate the fact that the general protocol for MSD on USB was created in the late 90s for an interface 400x slower than 3.0.
- Ballas 6y ago
  I had the same issue with a cheap Orico that identifies as a Toshiba device ID 0080:a001. In UAS mode it would work for a couple of seconds and start to fail, dropping transfer speed to a couple of hundred kB/s
eddhead 6y ago
This article references a Scott Adams creation, CANCEL!
rgomez 6y ago
Just did a "dd if=/dev/zero [etc]" in my Rapberry Pi 4: 4974456832 bytes (5,0 GB, 4,6 GiB) copied, 25,4896 s, 195 MB/s Using this controller and a Samsung EVO SSD drive, I'm really happy with the results: https://geekworm.com/collections/raspberry-pi/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b-x825-2-5-inch-sata-hdd-ssd-expansion-board https://geekworm.com/collections/raspberry-pi/products/raspb...
jvxp 6y ago
If you're interested in real world performance of SSD/HD and SD Cards on the pi's i found https://storage.jamesachambers.com/fastest/ https://storage.jamesachambers.com/fastest/ very useful.
neskiredk 6y ago
I honestly thought this was common knowledge.
jokoon 6y ago
Why can't the RPi have at least 1GB or 2GB of flash storage on its board? My 4 year old, 80 euro android has 8GB. It's not a secret SD cards quickly fail. I've not bought the RPi for that specific reason. Even if the RPi is 5 times slower, having reliable storage seems seems like a most important feature.
- kingosticks 6y ago
  Because forcing everyone to pay a chunk more money for on-board storage which not everyone needs is unnecessary. Their decision shows that cost is a more important feature and I don't think that should come as a surprise, there's plenty of stuff out there justifying the various decisions and it all comes down to cost.
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    I'm guessing if the RPi Foundation went that route with the Pi 5, it would be similar to the Compute Module where there would be a cheaper 'Lite' version without eMMC then more expensive ones with eMMC.
- markedathome 6y ago
  You have the Compute Module versions of the pi with embedded storage. The reasoning behind the SD cards on the consumer pis is that they are quick to swap out, and don't have the problems that "bricking" the OS could get you into with booting from onboard storage. There is the possibility to use USB booting in the latest boards (certainly with the 3+ not sure about the status of the 4) which has a flag set in the onboard eeprom so you can use external SSDs/USB drives.
  - delfinom 6y ago
    Ah yes, instead you have consumers learn the painful lesson of losing data when the SD cards eventually fail instead...
- _-___________-_ 6y ago
  So you'd prefer your flash, which will eventually fail, to be soldered to the board rather than easily replaceable?

489 points by geerlingguy 6y ago

The Pi 4 is a big revolution, fast enough to serve as a desktop computer for most office people, students, and so on. It's pretty impressive and more attention is being paid to it as a first-class computing platform as time goes on. Our desktop monoculture has led to serious security problems and massive stagnation at least until recently. Even if you don't use a Pi you should be thankful that they exist.

geerlingguy 6y ago
The CPU is now (IMHO) the major sticking point for many of my own use cases. It would also be nice to have an easier / less cumbersome way to connect higher speed storage. (The mess of cabling you get with an add-on USB 3.0 drive is annoying.)
- tlrobinson 6y ago
  > The mess of cabling you get with an add-on USB 3.0 drive is annoying I’m surprised there’s no Raspberry Pi case with a slot for a 2.5” drive and integrated USB 3.0 SATA controller.
  - Zenst 6y ago
    there are, can even make your own. One quick example https://www.amazon.co.uk/MakerHawk-Upgrated-Raspberry-2-5-Inch-Expansion/dp/B077JK3TYZ https://www.amazon.co.uk/MakerHawk-Upgrated-Raspberry-2-5-In...
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    There are a few, and they're not too bad, but it's still something that would be neatly solved with an option of a PCIe slot or even onboard eMMC like on the compute module (assuming the eMMC or built-in NVMe was much faster than the one on CM3+ and below).
  - gerdesj 6y ago
    I've just bought a Pi4, 7" touchscreen and a case that takes the lot. I have converted the thing to boot and run off a USB3 stick and it runs rather faster than off the SD card. I'm not too bothered about trying to turn it into a NUC. Nowadays I see a Pi as a kiosk style machine with extras. It is what it is. It is a fantastic jack of all trades. You get loads of GPIO of all sorts, bluetooth, wifi, ethernet, USB2 and 3, a quad core CPU and 2-8GB RAM. Two HDMI ports and a GPU. It's too much for jobs that you would deploy an ESP8266 or ESP32 and it's not enough for a full on desktop replacement. I can't see a need for more than 16 or 32GB of storage on one of these things. If your use case needs greater storage then it probably needs more "box" or I simply lack imagination. I have a C-64 under the telly in the sitting room (it has a QSII joystick and a USB interface). I have a ZX81 with 3" of rather stiff Blutac holding the 16Kb RAM expansion steady and a keyboard on a ribbon. Sometimes I go back to school and type in definitions for 8x8 blocks and make them run around the screen. I do not own a Sinclair C5, that would be silly. Mess of cabling: lol!
    - JohnBooty 6y ago
      I can't see a need for more than 16 or 32GB of storage on one of these things. If your use case needs greater storage then it probably needs more "box" or I simply lack imagination. Generally yeah. One possible (slightly contrived) exception that comes to mind could be using it as "dumb" volatile storage like Redis/memcached/etc. I say "dumb" because if you are leaning into any of Redis' more advanced stuff (sorted sets, pub/sub, whatever else they've thrown in lately) I suspect CPU would tend to become a bottleneck rather quickly once you've got > 8GB of data.
    - burfog 6y ago
      It's terrible that 2-8GB RAM is not enough for a full on desktop replacement. You could run Windows 95 in 4 MB. Was that not a desktop? The original Mac was just 128 KB. Suppose it was all for graphics. Scaling up for modern color depth and screen size, we should need about 400 MB for the Windows 95 level of efficiency, or about 64 MB for Mac level of efficiency. That's a huge overestimate because RAM is not all consumed by graphics. In other words, modern software can't run a desktop properly without even 10 to 100 times as much RAM as it ought to need.
  - rcarmo 6y ago
    NVME hanging off the USB bus would be nicer and more compact.
- pedrocr 6y ago
  At that point you probably want a NUC style computer like the Lenovo M75q. Up to 4 core 8 thread, 32GB+ RAM (two slots), AMD graphics and an M.2 slot. https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkCentre/ThinkCentre_M75q_Tiny/ThinkCentre_M75q_Tiny_Spec.pdf https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkCentre/ThinkCe...
  - nerdbeere 6y ago
    Also noteworthy is the upcoming ASUS PN 50 with the new Ryzen Renoir CPUs with up to 8 cores and 64GB RAM. When this will be available in Europe I’ll get that to replace my MacBook for a developer machine. https://liliputing.com/2020/06/asus-pn50-is-a-mini-pc-with-up-to-an-amd-ryzen-7-4800u-processor.html https://liliputing.com/2020/06/asus-pn50-is-a-mini-pc-with-u...
    - vondur 6y ago
      The 8 core 16 thread version looks very promising. Wonder what the prices will be?
    - drcross 6y ago
      x64 doesnt excite me as much as Arm does at the moment, for power draw.
  - thebruce87m 6y ago
    The DeskMini series has two M.2 slots AND two 2.5” slots in a tiny enclosure. Here’s mine: Noctua NH-L9A-AM4, 37mm Premium Low-profile CPU Cooler for AMD AM4 (Brown) £36.17 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/Noctua-NH-L9A-AM4-Premium-Low-profile-Cooler/dp/B075SG1T3X https://www.amazon.co.uk/Noctua-NH-L9A-AM4-Premium-Low-profi... ASRock USB 2.0 Header to 2 x USB 2.0 Cable for DeskMini Series Chassis £10.93 Incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Cable-Deskmini-Mini-Stx-Chassis/dp/B01N8ZNJ3U/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=asrock+usb&qid=1571139456&s=computers&sr=1-4 https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Cable-Deskmini-Mini-Stx-Chas... AMD Ryzen 5 3400G Processor (4C/8T, 6MB cache, 4.2GHz Max Boost) with Radeon™ RX Vega 11 Graphics £139.99 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07SXNDKNM/?tag=pcp0f-21 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07SXNDKNM/?tag=pcp0f-21 Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 Internal SSD High Performance Solid State Drive (SB-ROCKET-1TB) £109.99 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07LGF54XR/?tag=pcp0f-21&th=1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07LGF54XR/?tag=pcp0f-21&th=1 ASRock DeskMini A300 Mini PC Barebone for Socket AM4 £146.94 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07P9GL1LN/?tag=pcp0f-21 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07P9GL1LN/?tag=pcp0f-21 ASRock Wi-Fi Kit for DeskMini Series Chassis, includes 2 x Antennas £29.42 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Wi-Fi-DeskMini-Chassis-Antennas/dp/B07PDTNSYS/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=a300+wifi&qid=1570697428&s=computers&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Wi-Fi-DeskMini-Chassis-Anten... 2 x ADATA AD4S2666316G19-S 16GB DDR4 2666 MHz Memory Module - Memory Modules (16GB, 1x 16GB, DDR4, 2666MHz, 260-pin SO-DIMM) 2 x £73.12 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/ADATA-AD4S2666316G19-S-16GB-Memory-Module/dp/B07B61GLP1/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=AD4S2666316G19&qid=1570698649&s=computers&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/ADATA-AD4S2666316G19-S-16GB-Memory-... Price a few months ago - £619.68 Note that you don’t need the noctua fan but the provided fan that comes with the case is a bit whiny.
Narishma 6y ago
> The Pi 4 is a big revolution, fast enough to serve as a desktop computer for most office people, students, and so on. Even the Pi 3 was already good enough for most of those use cases. The main exception being browsing modern bloated websites.
- floatboth 6y ago
  The Cortex-A53 is really weak. I wouldn't want to run an office suite on that either. Oh, and the Pi 3 was VERY limited by RAM. "most office people, students, and so on" pretty much always do browse lots of modern websites, at the same time as running an office suite, audio player, and more stuff. The A72 is really the "minimum viable CPU core" for desktop usage. Anything with less single-core performance is absolute hell and suffering.
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    The CM 3+ (which is clocked at 1.2 GHz but is same in other ways to the Pi B 3+ which is 1.4 GHz) is less than half as fast as the Pi 4 in most CPU tasks: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-cluster-episode-5-benchmarking-turing-pi https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-cluster-...
  - megous 6y ago
    Not true. I barely notice any difference between my Orange Pi 3 (4x Cortex-A53 @ 1.8GHz) and my Ivy Bridge workstation, when browsing the web, and things like that. I don't run a heavy weight desktop though. The only noticeable thing is some increased latency (mainly due to storage speed limited to 20MiB/s read speeds), but animations and scrolling and basic stuff like that are pretty much smooth. I could easily run the system from USB attached SSD (which can achieve 15-20x the speeds of the SD card), and that would massively improve app startup speeds too. Also video playback sucks, but that's mainly due to software support, not a hardware issue. It's a chip meant for TV boxes after all. I wouldn't use it to compile programs, but office work? I can imagine that easily.
- miked85 6y ago
  > The main exception being browsing modern bloated websites. So, the most common use case for a desktop computer?
mixmastamyk 6y ago
It should be and is decent, but when we tried we ran into numerous paper-cuts: - Needed to set up NTP to set the clock, it was always wrong. - It can't power down through software, so you have to shut down and then hit the power switch like it's 1990. - Audio was a mess and had to spend hours researching how to write and edit a bunch of config files to make it predictable. - The weird set up program means you need to do a lot of googling on how to fix issues in a non-standard to linux way. It mostly works however. - Raspbian feels not quite "finished." Was much happier with Ubuntu Mate, as they fixed 99% of the paper cuts like audio already, but it doesn't support the 4 yet. In short, it is a bit too cheap. I would have definitely spent another dollar to see these hardware issues fixed. Or dropped the CPU speed a hundred MHZ, whatever it takes. In the end, a friend gave us a ten-year-old used iMac for free. I installed Ubuntu Mate on it and it had none of the above problems. It's even a touch faster.
- sgerenser 6y ago
  A touch faster? The slowest 2010 iMac is the 21" with an i3-540 Dual core CPU, Geekbench 4 is 2211 single/4466 multi. The Pi 4 is around 970/2000, less than half the performance. The Pi 4 has come a long way in speed since the lowly original Pi, but its still not even close to a 10 year old desktop PC (or iMac).
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    More people (even in 2010) used laptops than desktops, and the Pi is in line with the numbers from the cheaper MacBook Airs at the time (I still have one that runs... though it’s getting some weird green lines on the display). But I can say that working on the 2010 MBA is not fun; one of my webcams doesn’t even work with it (choppy at 30p), zoom is... slow at best, and web browsing is a bit choppy even with ad blockers. Even then, it is a smoother overall experience with that hardware and macOS than when I was testing 64-bit Pi OS on the 8 GB Pi 4 a few weeks ago: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-macbook-pro-raspberry-pi-4-8gb-day https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-macbook...
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
I tried to use the pi 4 as a nextcloud server and found it to be unbearably slow. Not sure what caused it but I suspect the sd card speed.
- swebs 6y ago
  I also had a recent install that was unbearably slow. It turns out that the SD card was corrupted. Raspberry Pi OS comes with a SD card checking utility you can use to check. Replacing it with a new class 10 card made it fast again.
  - sixothree 6y ago
    You can boot from USB now. No need for SD.
  - unicornporn 6y ago
    You should also go for at least Application Performance Class 1.
- 0ld 6y ago
  browsing media is still unusably slow on usb3 hdd as well. once it starts generating previews, youre done. pre-generating doesnt help much been using it for photo sync only, works fine enough as long as youre not using the web interface
  - delfinom 6y ago
    Did you try it using a UASP USB3 HDD though?
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    That was my issue. Images would take 3-10 seconds to show in the UI. Once I moved to a ryzen 5 server I was seeing everything load like it was local.
regularfry 6y ago
For my money they've pushed a fraction too hard on the CPU power. One of the best things for me about the 3 is that you don't need to worry about cooling the way you do with the 4. I get why, there's a huge demand for the 4 to be able to handle proper desktop applications, but I'd love to see a version that has the thermal characteristics of the 3 with the IO updates of the 4.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mschuster91 6y ago
  I'd actually like a new version of the Compute Module with the PCI-e lanes exposed (the more the better). That would be a real game changer for NAS systems. Or, for both CM and the full RPi, a docking header and a corresponding tiny module for a real-time clock module if not outright embed one. It's 2020 ffs.
- hajile 6y ago
  It's the price of that ancient 28nm manufacturing.

AnotherGoodName 6y ago

>I found a USB 3.0 SSD was ten times faster than the fastest microSD card I tested I looked it up because i know enough about hardware that this shouldn't be the case (even with a cheap SD Card). Seems it's a limitation of the Pi's SD Card slot. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2018/raspberry-pi-microsd-card-performance-comparison-2018 https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2018/raspberry-pi-microsd-...

UnlockedSecrets 6y ago
Note this is only valid for raspberry pi's made before the 4, The 4 includes a much faster SD card slot.
- mlyle 6y ago
  Note that the testing was done on a Pi 4...
  - UnlockedSecrets 6y ago
    > tested on a Raspberry Pi model 3 B+: No it wasn't.
    - geerlingguy 6y ago
      This one, however, was: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-microsd-card-performance-comparison-2019 https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-microsd-... Even on my Mac (tested with 6 different readers, including one purporting A2 compatibility) the best microSD cards are abysmal for random access. But they do get closer to 90-120 MB/sec for reads, at least. To get advertised speeds on most of the cards, I am guessing you need to work for the SD association's marketing department :D https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-microsd-follow-sd-association-fools-me-twice https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-microsd-...
      - kohtatsu 6y ago

floatboth 6y ago

> Without UASP, a drive is mounted as a Mass Storage Device using Bulk Only Transport (or BOT), a protocol that was designed for transferring files way back in the USB 'Full speed' days Wow, holy shit, TIL.. I was always assuming that USB drives were always SCSI — they show up as 'da' (Direct Attach) on FreeBSD after all. Looking at umass driver source: * The driver handles 3 Wire Protocols * - Command/Bulk/Interrupt (CBI) * - Command/Bulk/Interrupt with Command Completion Interrupt (CBI with CCI) * - Mass Storage Bulk-Only (BBB) (BBB refers Bulk/Bulk/Bulk for Command/Data/Status phases) * Over these wire protocols it handles the following command protocols * - SCSI * - UFI (floppy command set) * - 8070i (ATAPI) * UFI and 8070i (ATAPI) are transformed versions of the SCSI command set. Huh, they are pretty much always SCSI, and "bulk only" is (unsurprisingly) only a USB transport level thing that doesn't change the command set. I guess "UASP" is some sort of marketing term for Command/Bulk/Interrupt then..?

megous 6y ago
Goals section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Attached_SCSI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Attached_SCSI
- floatboth 6y ago
  > The native Intel USB3 UASP solution is only supported under Windows 8. To further complicate matters, not all Z77 motherboards support USB3 UASP. A license is required to implement UASP, and not all motherboard manufacturers are prepared to pass on the extra cost of this license to the end user Sounds very cursed. I mean, I'm not a hardware vendor, I should not care, but licensing for something that's just another form of SCSI over USB sounds ridiculous.
bakul 6y ago
FreeBSD doesn't support UASP (protocol id 98). AFAIK neither do the other three BSDs.
- qubex 6y ago
  Kudos for remembering DragonFlyBSD. We’re flattered.

totalZero 6y ago

Friends, I have a question but I don't have a Pi 4 sitting around to test this: Is it possible to run a Pi 4 using UASP if I set it up to boot from a decent (Sandisk/Samsung/etc) USB 3.1 pen drive? Also, is this a reliable setup, or will the device be more stable if booted and run from a MicroSD?

geerlingguy 6y ago
I'm going to be testing a few different thumb drives in my next post / video. I have a couple SanDisk models and an Arcanite USB 3.1 drive that I'll be testing... but I don't believe they use UASP (haven't had time to confirm that suspicion yet).
- Legogris 6y ago
  Thanks Jeff, you’re doing a great service to the community here. I’ve tried to hunt around for a good system drive and fell short so far; support for UASP/TRIM in thumb drives is both rare, and seldom specified by manufacturers even when present. Looks like the only way is to buy a bunch and try.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ehonda 6y ago
I am not sure about which pen drives support UASP, but one thing of note is they recently updated their firmware (June 15th) to support boot over USB instead of the SD Card. I have mine setup this way now, using an external hard drive enclosure that supports UASP. Works great.
fomine3 6y ago
Almost all USB thumb drives are garbage for booting OS because very bad performance for random read/write (Getting worse over time). IIRC SanDisk Extreme Pro is an exception.

bhouston 6y ago

How does a USB 3.x NVMe drive function on the RPi4? I notice those on Amazon as well.

dmitrygr 6y ago

What possible "controller feature" would be needed from the controller on the hardware side to support just another USB protocol?

kevinoid 6y ago
I was curious about this as well. The issue appears to be lack of scatter-gather support. See: https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/875#issuecomment-482533041 https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/875#issuecomment...
- dmitrygr 6y ago
  which is not required to implement any usb protocol. one can easily use normal DMA and still get a speed gain. since the bottleneck is not CPU, making it work a bit harder putting together those DMA descriptors is worth it.
floatboth 6y ago
apparently XHCI Streams

justanother 6y ago

Excellent reading this; My Pi4/8GB cluster uses a 1000bT PoE hub for a backplane, and / is an nfsroot from a node running a Sandisk UASP USB3 SSD. Like the author, I'm blown away by the fun to be had with Docker and Kubernetes on this cluster. Unlike the author, I'm having a great experience with it as a Mac-replacing daily driver (thanks mostly to never running chromium on the same node that runs gnome-session, to spread things out a bit). Love to read about everyone's Pi cluster adventures.

geerlingguy 6y ago
I think I could make it work, but the hindrance to my media (library of 65,000+ RAW photos from three different camera bodies and about 8 TB of 1080p video projects (and counting)) workflows was what really killed it for me. Even basic photo import / adjustments were a pain with any of the applications I tested, and that was partly due to the Pi's slower GPU/CPU, the 64-bit ARM paucity of desktop apps, and the lack of good (read: like Adobe/Apple/pro-tier media apps) UI-based applications on Linux. Most of the other issues (like window management and resolution problems) I ran into with the 'Pi for a Day' project I could probably resolve with a few more days' work.

blattimwind 6y ago

> I used a Satechi USB-C power tester and measured an 8% peak power savings using UASP. That means you'd get 8% more runtime on a battery if you do a lot of file transfers. No no, even better! Peak power consumption is lower, but the same work is completed much more quickly due to increased throughput, so the energy required for the same work is decreased dramatically. Between the performance increase and the lower power usage I wouldn't be surprised if this reduces energy use by 50 %.

geerlingguy 6y ago
It depends a lot on the workload, though. That kind of statistic is hard to draw any solid conclusions from, except that “it uses less CPU and less overall power during IO activity” and you’ll save some amount of energy consumption (depending on what you’re doing).
repsilat 6y ago
Yeah. This kind of savings comes up in interesting places elsewhere -- if you make your algorithm run twice as fast but using twice the memory, your time-integrated memory use (measured in gigabyte seconds) remains the same. So if you can make good use of that memory while your algorithm isn't running, you're saving CPU and not really using more RAM. For something like the Pi this is unlikely, but in data centers with big, latency-insensitive distributed workloads "using memory for less time" can be a real win. (The battery example with the Pi really is the perfect example though, because you're usually interested in the time-integrated value more than the peak draw.)
asudosandwich 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

TaylorAlexander 6y ago

Well, looks like I need to ditch the SD cards on my Pi4 based robot! Seems like this would improve reliability over SD cards too.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

I've been using UASP SSD drives in Linux for ~ 5 years, the main issue I face is not performance related but w.r.t monitoring. S.M.A.R.T doesn't behave well with UASP, so not all Smartmontools's feature work[1]. Especially, LifeTime of the SSD don't and they are crucial. I had to resort to calculating remaining life of the SSD manually from the reported lifecycles and negating it with the manufacture's MTBF if they're reported. I've faced this with devices from varying price range [USB 3.0/3.1] - MyDigitalSSD(OTG), Samsung T5, various ORICO USB SSD enclosures with Samsung EVO/Crucial SSDs on host systems of different architectures(x86/ARM). How are you all monitoring the life of your USB SSD on UASP in Linux? [1]https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/USB https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/USB

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
Update: smartctl 6.6 on Ubuntu18.04 Jetson Nano (aarch64) gives Total_LBAs_Written for Samsung 840 Evo in ORICO USB 3.0 SSD enclosure (UASP) and Samsung T5 SSD USB 3.0 but failed to read S.M.A.R.T data properly for MyDigitalSSD(OTG) which is likely the fault of the controller in it. So with Total_LBAs_Written we can find TBW (Total Bytes Written) and compare it with manufacturer's data[1]. [1]https://www.virten.net/2016/12/ssd-total-bytes-written-calculator/ https://www.virten.net/2016/12/ssd-total-bytes-written-calcu...
elFarto 6y ago
I have a USB 3.0 Orico enclosure with a Pi4 and I had to pass '-d sat' to smartctl for it to work: smartctl -a -d sat /dev/sda Newer versions of smartmontools shouldn't need it, only the older one that Raspberry PI OS has.

scottlamb 6y ago

But does it work reliably? I have a cheap Inateck dock which does support UASP (the FD2005). Two or three times I had a bunch of errors like these: Sep 22 17:26:01 nuc kernel: sd 4:0:0:1: [sdb] tag#2 uas_eh_abort_handler 0 uas-tag 3 inflight: CMD OUT Sep 22 17:26:01 nuc kernel: sd 4:0:0:1: [sdb] tag#2 CDB: Write(16) 8a 00 00 00 00 01 4d b4 c4 00 00 00 03 b0 00 00 ... Sep 22 17:26:22 nuc kernel: usb 2-3: stat urb: no pending cmd for uas-tag 2 ... Sep 22 17:26:22 nuc kernel: xhci_hcd 0000:00:14.0: ERROR Unknown event condition 34 for slot 3 ep 3 , HC probably busted followed by filesystem corruption. I found other folks complaining about similar problems, eg: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/239782/connection-problem-with-usb3-external-storage-on-linux-uas-driver-problem https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/239782/connection-p... Then I disabled UAS. Haven't had any corruption since. It's not absolute proof, but I believe the firmware and/or driver support for UAS with this dock is buggy, and the older protocol works fine. I like speed as much as the next person, but not if it means repeated filesystem corruption...

bsder 6y ago
I'm all for blaming dodgy chipsets, but the Superspeed and Superspeed+ support in Linux definitely has not had all of its rough edges filed off yet either--especially the stuff that uses streams and asynchrony. However, the article comparing to USB 1.1 is silly. If you are on USB 2.0 (and I haven't bumped into anything mass storage in the last 10 years that isn't), the bulk endpoints are quite happy to take advantage of the USB 2.0 bulk packet size (512 bytes) and microframes (120us turnarounds) with 13 packets per microframe. That's going to get you in the 400Mbps+(40Megabytes/sec) range without a lot of problem.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  That’s still less than half the speed you get from USB 3.0 even without UASP from a cheap SSD. I drew the 1.1 comparison mostly to illustrate the fact that the general protocol for MSD on USB was created in the late 90s for an interface 400x slower than 3.0.
Ballas 6y ago
I had the same issue with a cheap Orico that identifies as a Toshiba device ID 0080:a001. In UAS mode it would work for a couple of seconds and start to fail, dropping transfer speed to a couple of hundred kB/s

eddhead 6y ago

This article references a Scott Adams creation, CANCEL!

rgomez 6y ago

Just did a "dd if=/dev/zero [etc]" in my Rapberry Pi 4: 4974456832 bytes (5,0 GB, 4,6 GiB) copied, 25,4896 s, 195 MB/s Using this controller and a Samsung EVO SSD drive, I'm really happy with the results: https://geekworm.com/collections/raspberry-pi/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b-x825-2-5-inch-sata-hdd-ssd-expansion-board https://geekworm.com/collections/raspberry-pi/products/raspb...

jvxp 6y ago

If you're interested in real world performance of SSD/HD and SD Cards on the pi's i found https://storage.jamesachambers.com/fastest/ https://storage.jamesachambers.com/fastest/ very useful.

neskiredk 6y ago

I honestly thought this was common knowledge.

jokoon 6y ago

Why can't the RPi have at least 1GB or 2GB of flash storage on its board? My 4 year old, 80 euro android has 8GB. It's not a secret SD cards quickly fail. I've not bought the RPi for that specific reason. Even if the RPi is 5 times slower, having reliable storage seems seems like a most important feature.

kingosticks 6y ago
Because forcing everyone to pay a chunk more money for on-board storage which not everyone needs is unnecessary. Their decision shows that cost is a more important feature and I don't think that should come as a surprise, there's plenty of stuff out there justifying the various decisions and it all comes down to cost.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  I'm guessing if the RPi Foundation went that route with the Pi 5, it would be similar to the Compute Module where there would be a cheaper 'Lite' version without eMMC then more expensive ones with eMMC.
markedathome 6y ago
You have the Compute Module versions of the pi with embedded storage. The reasoning behind the SD cards on the consumer pis is that they are quick to swap out, and don't have the problems that "bricking" the OS could get you into with booting from onboard storage. There is the possibility to use USB booting in the latest boards (certainly with the 3+ not sure about the status of the 4) which has a flag set in the onboard eeprom so you can use external SSDs/USB drives.
- delfinom 6y ago
  Ah yes, instead you have consumers learn the painful lesson of losing data when the SD cards eventually fail instead...
_-___________-_ 6y ago
So you'd prefer your flash, which will eventually fail, to be soldered to the board rather than easily replaceable?