Boot Raspberry Pi 4 from USB storage device

HappyTux · 02-08-2021, 01:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by andrewufrank

I just tried to boot from an SSD connected with JMicron USA Technology Corp. JMS567 SATA 6Gb/s bridge -- seemingly the same device that Exaga (and some others) found to work. Mine did not work (the same SSD boots ok with another bridge - thus the SSD is ok).
Eventually I found with lsusb that the device ID is different. Mine (brand new Jan. 2021) has ID 152d:0578 which does not work, but the ID 152d:0567 is reported to work.
Unfortunate!

Yeah the bait and switch, Amazon got me for a couple of "new improved" Neeyer the ones supposed to work, they did not nothing but massive I/O errors on any file copy to them without being connected to a Pi. I got a Star Tech model mentioned here it works great and a GPT boot drive is wonderfully it stops the delay of it searching before it gives up on it and moves to a MBR drive. and uses it. I discovered then when I was cloning my SSD to a backup and forgot to set the boot flag. I had set it to text boot so could see it when it errored with no bootable partitions found where I could see the warning of the GPT partition not being found just before that error, as it would do a couple of tries and give it with each failure.

Exaga · 03-17-2021, 01:31 PM

An update on previous information...

Today I've managed to get hold of a Startech USB3.1-SATA adapter - USB312SAT3CB - in order to test it for compatibility and reliability, and found it to be working really, really well with the Raspberry Pi 4.

Obivously, the claimed 10Gbps data throughput is never going to be possible with this kind of setup. Although it is slightly quicker than the USB3S2SAT3CB that I've been using for a while, it's not significant. Shaved about 4-5 minutes off a full installation of Slackware ARM current which took approx. 1 hour. The new USB312SAT3CB uses the "ASMedia ASM1351" chipset, which is an upgrade on the "ASMedia ASM1153E" chipset in the existing USB3S2SAT3CB adapter I have, and gives great performance without any problems whatsoever. The USB312SAT3CB ($20) is approx. +$5 more than the USB3S2SAT3CB ($12-$15) and for use on a Raspberry Pi (not sure about any other ARM devices as I haven't tested yet) it's not really worth the extra cash for the marginal performance increase.

I tested with a Kingston SSDnow V300 480GB SSD - the same drive that's been running on my RPi4/4GB via the USB3S2SAT3CB adapter for many months without a single issue. The new adapter seems to be just as tenacious. So, if any of you Slackers are looking for a USB-SATA adapter to run hard drives or SSDs on your ARM devices then you can't go wrong with either of these.

[EDIT] one more thing... SDD 'Disk model' identification, there's some disparity with these 2 adapters...

StarTech USB3.1-SATA - USB312SAT3CB :

Code:

root@torq:~# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 447.13 GiB, 480103981056 bytes, 937703088 sectors
Disk model: BarraCuda Q1 SSD     <<< this is the accurate brand/model SSD ID

StarTech USB3.0-SATA - USB3S2SAT3CB :

Code:

root@torq:~# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 447.13 GiB, 480103981056 bytes, 937703088 sectors
Disk model: ASM105x     <<< this is an ASMedia (controller?) ID from the USB-SATA adapter

Exaga · 10-17-2022, 07:03 AM

This is 100% tested and confirmed. The Sabrent EC-SSHD USB3-SATA adapter is incompatible with the Raspberry Pi devices but seems to work perfectly on other computer systems.