NVME to USB3 adapters for Pi4

I have a UGreen CM238, it's not the fastest, and doesn't run particularly cool (that may be down to my M.2 sticks).

I like that it's tool-less (cover slides off, rubber widget to hold the M.2 instead of screws, also it has USB-C socket instead of plug, so you use it with a [short] cable it feels unlikely to get snapped-off.

No longer available though ... but they sell similar models.

I have been using this with a Pi 5 without any trouble:

I can’t conveniently test it with a Pi 4 right now because it’s in use...

NOT a direct answer to your question, but ...

I have one of these cases:

I've found that when it works it works quite well, but sometimes it won't boot. I think the USB3-SATA adaptor isn't ready quickly enough and the Pi doesn't see the SSD.

I have a regime that involves booting the Pi4 from an SD card and then

Apart from the booting issue I think this is quite a good solution for running a Pi4 with better storage than an SD card.

This won't let you use the NVMe SSD you already have, of course. With SSD prices being what they are at the moment I can understand your wanting to use what you have.

I have 2 USB3 media controllers, one for M.2 NVMe drives and one for SATAIII drives. Both were cheap and both have JMicron chipsets.

On 3 different AMD64 machines running Debian 13 I had no end of unreliability issues until I disabled UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol) and forced them to use the older and slower USB Mass Storage Protocol. This was with a line in /etc/modprobe.d/uas.conf. After that they both work splendidly but a little slower.

The USB to NVMe adapter came from Amazon and is no longer available. It's not tool-free but is in a nice aluminium case with a size to hold a

The same drive worked perfectly with Win11 running on an identical laptop to my Linux laptop so this appears to be a Linux-Debian/JMicron driver / firmware issue.

I'm not alone having these issues but maybe newer JMicron chips work splendidly. Overall advice was to look for devices using ASMedia Technology chipsets. That was in 2020-2023 and maybe the latest JMicron devices support UASP on Linux with no issues.

For what it cost and the performance I get then I would still buy one of these despite USAP having to be disabled.

Andy

Odd, I've always found UASP improved performance, without causing reliability issues.

I bought a Ugreen

So, I bought an NVME pcie thing for the rPi5 instead, which does work.

But not with these particular JMicron devices. If you enable it then after a few seconds of fast transfers you get a blizzard of errors. Then the device re-enumerates and you get a few more seconds of good transfer then it repeats.

They work brilliantly with UASP disabled. I can't complain, the NVMe one cost £6.50 and the SATA one £3.00.

As another unhelpful aside, I burnt out the USB3 ports on my rPi4. I think because my powered USB/SSD adapter backfed power when I disconnected the rPi main power.

I still use my rPi4 as a NAS but with a USB2 port. I don't seem to notice, i.e. the slower speed doesn't seem to bother my typical use case.