Sdspeed polish install#
Sdspeed polish upgrade#

Flash memory devices wear out over time.The price difference was only a few pounds so I figured in a few years I would rather be left with a larger drive for possible use in other projects.I really don’t need 100GB+ of space on my Pi 400 so why did I choose a 240GB over a 128GB device? There were two reasons: At this point I realised I didn’t need to resize anything to take advantage of the extra space. This shows the 250MB FAT32 “boot” partition and an EXT4 ~240GB partition. Once installed I ran it from the command line using: gparted

Sdspeed polish install#

To double-check what partitions I now had on the new SSD I installed GParted: sudo apt install gparted Check Pi 400 SSD Partitions Using GParted The important bit is “Class=Mass Storage, Driver=uas”. To check if my drive was using UASP I ran the following command: lsusb -t Most new drives and adapters will support it. USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP) is a technology used by SSDs to improve read/write performance and lower CPU utilisation. For my purposes this simple approach is good enough and counts as a massive improvement over the SD card. There is a lot of debate when it comes to measuring performance of flash memory devices. The Random read speed increased from 2411 to 15326. The Random write speed increased from 785 to 15968. The sequential write speed had increased from 26MB/s to 306MB/s. Random read speed 15326 IOPS (target 1500) - PASS Random write speed 15968 IOPS (target 500) - PASS Sequential write speed 306242 KB/sec (target 10000) - PASS With the system now running from the SSD I re-ran the diagnostics utility to get some numbers: Raspberry Pi Diagnostics - version 0.6 The lights on the SATA-USB adapter blinked and the Pi 400 booted to the Raspberry Pi OS desktop. With the SD card removed and the SSD plugged into a USB-3.0 port I inserted the power cable. Once shutdown I removed the power cable and removed the SD card. Using the menu I told the Pi to shutdown. The process took a few minutes and when finished it stated the copy had finished. WARNING: Make sure you copy the SD Card to the new SSD! The Crucial 240GB SSD was the “CT240BX5 00SSD1”. In my case “SC128” was the 128GB SanDisk card. Then selected my SD card under “Copy From Device” and my SSD under “Copy To Device”. Using the menu I ran the “SD Card Copier” utility under “Accessories”. The SSD was plugged into the Pi 400 using one of the USB 3.0 ports (the ones with the blue plastic) using the adapter cable. More information about SD card speed ratings is available from the SD Association’s site. These are good results and are to be expected given the SanDisk’s Class 10 rating. Random read speed 2411 IOPS (target 1500) - PASS Random write speed 785 IOPS (target 500) - PASS Sequential write speed 26099 KB/sec (target 10000) - PASS

Here is the log using my SanDisk card: Raspberry Pi Diagnostics - version 0.6 Then clicking “Show Logs” will give you the technical information. Simply click “Run Tests” and wait for it to finish. This is available from the main menu under “Accessories”.

Sdspeed polish upgrade#

To ensure I could easily compare the performance before and after the upgrade I ran the “Raspberry Pi Diagnostics utility”. The important bits to note are the two “up-to-date” messages and the CURRENT/LATEST numbers both matching. This gave me the output: BCM2711 detectedįW DIR: /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/critical Then I checked the firmware was up to date and would support booting from an SSD: sudo rpi-eeprom-update To start with my Pi 400 was running fine with the SanDisk card loaded with a recent Raspberry Pi OS image. The BX500 isn’t the best drive out there but is fine for using with the Pi. There are a lot of different SDD models out there to choose from but there isn’t much point buying a premium model for general tasks. This worked out as the same price as buying a decent 256GB SD card. The drive cost $34 (£25) and the cable cost $6 (£4.50) including postage. For my upgrade I purchased a Crucial BX500 240GB SSD (SATA interface) and a SATA-USB adapter cable. The Pi 3 and Pi 4 can boot from USB devices and this includes an SSD plugged in via an adapter cable. It resulted in an approximate x10 increase in drive performance. The short answer is that is really easy and only took me 5-10 minutes to swap from the SD card to the new SSD. That had been working fine but I decided to give an SSD a try to see how easy it would be. I have been running my Pi 400 from a SanDisk Ultra 128GB Class 10 A1 microSD card. With the price of SSDs dropping to pocket-money prices you can perform this upgrade for less than $40 (£30). It can give your Pi additional storage capacity, improved reliability as well as massively increased read/write performance. Booting a Pi 400 from an SSD is an easy upgrade from the standard SD card.