Hello,

The rpi3b+ can power only a single HDD 4TB, like usb western digital.

Can the RPI4 and/or RPI5 power two HDD disks, like 4TB or higher?


Raspberry Pi® 4 B 8 GB 4 x 1.5 GHz Raspberry Pi®
vs
Raspberry Pi® 5 B 8 GB 4 x 2.4 GHz Raspberry Pi®

here the classic power supply
https://i.postimg.cc/m2rhMvbV/Screen...9-11-08-16.png

Kind regards

I can only speak for the RazPi 4. Approx 1 Amp is allocated for usb power @5V.

So you can power no 3.5" drives, because they require a 12V supply. There is the question of whether you have 220V or 240V mains, as the earlier "Official" PSUs were 240V rated with transformers. Running on 220V mains left your cpu underpowered.Things are unhappy at 4.8V

I resorted to a switch mode 110/240V Switched mode 5.1V power supply. I can run 1 2.5" SSD and have never looked back, once I ditched the "Official" psu. I could probably run 2, even 2 spinning rust drives as long as they stayed under 500 mA. Spin-ups on spinning rust involve considerable current and two drives spinning up together would probably crash the device. So it depends on how careful you want to be.

BTW I have a 1.5GHz Pi 4 with a transformer psu. I believe later models ran at 1.8GHz as standard and had a switched mode supply. I overclocked mine to 2 GHz for some time, but had to drop back to 1.8GHz.

It isn't so much your power supply, it is the fact that each USB socket can only power certain units up to a limit.

I believe RPi4 shares 1.2 between the sockets, whereas, by using the power supply made for the RPi5, it has something like 900mA available on each socket, but only the same as the RPi4, if powered by the RPi4 power supply.

So, basically, it comes down to how much power your drives need - but you may well need an external powered hub.

The RPI5 is a different animal. Both USB 3.0 ports can easily power a portable drive. I am using the RPI 5V-5A walwart they sale to power. For example, I boot off a USB 3.0 2TB Samsung T7 SSD. I added a WD 4TB HDD portable drive in other USB 3.0 slot. For 'max' config, I also added a keyboard and mouse so all usb ports in use. Also added a HDMI display (normally run my systems headless). I then backed up my server (1.8TB of data) to the 4TB drive. The PI5 had no problem doing this. No stuttering, no errors, just zipped along as fast as the HDD could take it. My RPI4s puked on this setup (and not an external power supply problem as stated above). BTW the USB ports are full speed (not shared as on the RPI4s and 3s) so a much better platform for a small NAS device performance wise. That said, I have/had RPI4s running a single 500GB T5/T7s no problem (as boot drives). Obviously you can always attached a powered USB 3.0 hub for more connections on any of the PIs but previous to the 5 you run into the shared port problem. FWIW, I rarely use the SD slot except in special cases as booting from an external SSD is much faster and much snappier loading apps. Bottom line the RPI people finally got almost everything right with the RPI5. Happy with them (now have 4 RPI5s). Forgot to mention there is now a 'hat' to add a PCI NVME SSD to the RPI5 as well. Haven't got my hands on one yet to test with.

@rclark
Pimoroni seem to make the best M2 adapter for the RPi5, from what I've read - good to hear you've had no problems with yours - I've read the Raspberry Forums, & some people seem to have had some troubles with theirs.

(I wasn't going to upgrade, but I seem to have some spare cash, so maybe I will....)

Don't want to hijack this storage thread, but can any of you guys with pi 5s give me one word on the state of play on the video driver?

So far so good. All four RPI-5s seem to be working great. They are all working headless, so I can't comment on the DE or any problems there. The only thing I've ran into on my upgrades has been a device (4x8 LED display) that isn't supported on the RPI5 . So my Star Trek desktop computer doesn't have a working display. Same with a little spy camera that now won't work because the connector is to big for the camera slots. Little things.... One thing that I like is my Star trek computer's RPI-5 can now power directly the Adafruit Metro Grand Centeral M4 board through a USB 3.0 port. The Metro board works the lights, button switches, dials, etc. Ie. only one power cable needed instead of two! Cool beans.

Problem here is finding them in stock .

Along with the RPI5, get the 5V/5A power supply and the active cooler and your good to go for any situation you may run into.

As for the graphics, the only help I can give is this : https://www.phoronix.com/review/rasp...i-5-graphics/2 <-- more than one word, sorry.

wow the quartzpro64 from Pine is the fastest one!

It features 8 cores !

https://liliputing.com/quartzpro64-i...-and-16gb-ram/

Well the raspberry lot exceeded my expectations. I thought they'd have only started a project. Graphics was apparently a make-or-break thing with Broadcom. Good for them.

It's a job of work patching a stable system with all those commits, but probably do-able.

@Xeratul: The Orange Pi 5 & Rock Pi 5 have that spec from the RK3588 also. The Orange Pi comes with different options, afaict meaning you can have this OR that, but not both. It seems ±€200 gets you a board. They also have an M-2 option (pcie-2.x iirc) up on Aliexpress.com.

For sure, sndwvs has working Orange Pi 5 images on the slarm64 site. Can guys in the Excited States buy from China without punitive duties?

Do you really mean how many can they drive, or how many can they control?
You need a power supply to drive the physical devices that require power the RPi does not provide (either adequately or at ALL).

I thought he was talking about two 'portable' (usb powered) 4TB drives. With desktop HDDs you do need a case and a separate power supply as you noted. Much like the WD My Book series of drives. If you use My Books you are not limited to the smaller <=4TB drives but have option of 12, 16, 18, etc. TB drives.

If you have a powered cage and a USB to FW-SCSI adapter you ucan address up to 16 individual drives by address, or address up to 255 drives ads individual LUNs at a single address. (I have yet to see the performance hit of running cages to address 3,825 drives through one interface, but it is theoretically possible by the SCSI definitions!)

Theoretically you could run that number of drives. I doubt if it will be done, as on the Pi 4 there's the bottleneck of a usb-3.0 port, or GPIO bus. On the Pi 5, you do have an M2 @pcie-2, iirc.

I was going to use a RPI4 as a server back when, but the bottleneck was 'very' apparent when I tried a full rsync copy of my server data to an external WD drive attached to the RPI4. It was painful to watch as it stuttered slowly along. The RPI5 on the other hand is the way to go. No more bottleneck. It would handle multiple external drives easily (via a powered USB 3.0 hub). I'll stick with just two .. one on each 3.0 port and maybe one on the PCI connector (have a PCI SSD adapter on the way, so will be testing 'soon').

Even dd'ing an image to an sdcard is slow.

For backup, I leave an sdcard in proximity to my RazPi 4. I reboot on that, and sneak off to my pc with the SSD I normally use. There I can fsck and backup at speed. If I get another SBC, it will probably be an Orange Pi 5. But I'll check for video drivers first.

These kernel video efforts on the Pi 5 sound commendable. What really matters to me, however, is the Mesa DRI driver. Have you got a 'razpi_drv.so' or similar in Mesa? That's the acid test. If so, can you play 4K, or 2xHDMI screens on nasty videos which need considerable redrawing frequently? Does a redraw happen instantly if you jump forward or back 10 seconds?