Darth Vader
From the Dark Side
It came to pass that I bought some cheap 120 GB SSDs that had a good write up. They cost £16.19 delivered from Amazon so wasn't expecting much. I used them in other projects and these SSDs were noticeably faster than more expensive known brands of SATA devices that I had. So I turned my attention back to the early Pi4 and below I show some results from the Pi Diags:-
Raspberry Pi Diagnostics - version 0.5
________________________Sunbow 120GB___WD Green 120GB__MicroSDXC 128GB
Sequential write speed:_____259035 KB/sec______95533 KB/sec____ _33233 KB/sec__________(target 10000)
Random write speed:_______12880 IOPS________7536 IOPS________1541 IOPS____________(target 500)
Random read speed:_______13117 IOPS________11787 IOPS_______3950 IOPS____________(target 1500)
To make things even I cloned the MicroSDXC to the two SSDs above.
The most expensive boot device at over £30 the MicroSDXC 128GB Class 10 Ultra High Speed was the slowest by far and the unknown cheapo SSD was the fastest. This combo is now good enough to be called a computer. It works really well headless using a VNC remote client and would fit in a neat small case.
I don't know about the lifetime of this cheapo SSD but after several hours there was no noticeable heating of its case.
Cheers,
DV
PS my SUNBOW came in a plastic case and is soooo light I wondered what was inside. So as its Sunday I opened the box and inside was a small board about 44x53mm with 4 mounting holes although the card itself was floating and just held in position by lugs. Two of the mounting holes align with 2 on the Pi4 so it should be possible to mount the SSD on the Pi.
Raspberry Pi Diagnostics - version 0.5
________________________Sunbow 120GB___WD Green 120GB__MicroSDXC 128GB
Sequential write speed:_____259035 KB/sec______95533 KB/sec____ _33233 KB/sec__________(target 10000)
Random write speed:_______12880 IOPS________7536 IOPS________1541 IOPS____________(target 500)
Random read speed:_______13117 IOPS________11787 IOPS_______3950 IOPS____________(target 1500)
To make things even I cloned the MicroSDXC to the two SSDs above.
The most expensive boot device at over £30 the MicroSDXC 128GB Class 10 Ultra High Speed was the slowest by far and the unknown cheapo SSD was the fastest. This combo is now good enough to be called a computer. It works really well headless using a VNC remote client and would fit in a neat small case.
I don't know about the lifetime of this cheapo SSD but after several hours there was no noticeable heating of its case.
Cheers,
DV
PS my SUNBOW came in a plastic case and is soooo light I wondered what was inside. So as its Sunday I opened the box and inside was a small board about 44x53mm with 4 mounting holes although the card itself was floating and just held in position by lugs. Two of the mounting holes align with 2 on the Pi4 so it should be possible to mount the SSD on the Pi.
Last edited:
