sata

After months of testing various SATA cards on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, the default Raspberry Pi OS kernel now includes SATA support out of the box.

In the past, if you wanted to use SATA hard drives or SSDs and get native SATA speeds, and be able to RAID them together for redundancy or performance, you'd have to recompile the Linux kernel with SATA and AHCI.

Sure you could always use hard drives and SSDs with SATA to USB adapters, but you sacrifice 10-20% of the performance, and can't RAID them together, at least not without some hacks.

There's a video version of this post: SATA support is now built into Raspberry Pi OS!

In my earlier posts about building a custom Raspberry Pi SATA NAS, and supercharging it with 2.5G networking and OMV, I noted that my builds were experimental only—they were a mess of cables and parts, with a hilariously-oversized 700W PC power supply.

I lamented the fact there was no simple "SATA backplane on a board" for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. But no longer.

Wiretrustee's SATA Board integrates a SATA controller and data and power for up to four SATA drives with a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.

And their entire solution makes for a great little Raspberry Pi-based NAS, using software like OpenMediaVault.

A few months ago, I posted a video titled Enterprise SAS RAID on the Raspberry Pi... but I never actually showed a SAS drive in it. And soon after, I posted another video, The Fastest SATA RAID on a Raspberry Pi.

Well now I have actual enterprise SAS drives running on a hardware RAID controller on a Raspberry Pi, and it's faster than the 'fastest' SATA RAID array I set up in that other video.

A Broadcom engineer named Josh watched my earlier videos and realized the ancient LSI card I was testing would not likely work with the ARM processor in the Pi, so he was able to send two pieces of kit my way:

I'm a fan of Raspberry Pi cases that keep my Pi cool. And the cases made by Argon Forty have great cooling, which is one reason they're a popular choice. Their latest Argon One M.2 case also adds a built-in high speed SSD drive slot!

A few months ago, someone from Argon Forty reached out and asked if I'd like to review the Argon ONE M.2, after they watched my video on booting a Pi 4 from an external SSD, and I accepted.

Unlike most Pi cases, this one actually adds features through it's design, like putting all the ports on the back, and adding a mostly-internal SSD, and so I decided to put it through its paces and see what I liked, and what I didn't like.

Video Review

I also posted a video version of this blog post on YouTube:

Since the day I received a pre-production Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and IO Board, I've been testing a variety of PCI Express cards with the Pi, and documenting everything I've learned.

The first card I tested after completing my initial review was the IO Crest 4-port SATA card pictured with my homegrown Pi NAS setup below:

But it's been a long time testing, as I wanted to get a feel for how the Raspberry Pi handled a variety of storage situations, including single hard drives and SSD and RAID arrays built with mdadm.

I also wanted to measure thermal performance and energy efficiency, since the end goal is to build a compact Raspberry-Pi based NAS that is competitive with any other budget NAS on the market.

tl;dr: If you see weird errors when using or formatting a drive internally on a Mac (especially after upgrading to a newer and/or faster SATA hard drive), it could mean the SATA cable needs to be replaced.

Who would've thought such a tiny cable could cause so many problems?

I have an older Mac mini (mid-2011 i5 model), and I use it as a general media server and network backup. It handles Time Machine backups for two other Macs, it has about 20 TB of external storage connected, and I also use it as a 'home base' to store all my Dropbox, iCloud, and Photos content locally, and store an extra Time Machine backup of all that. I'm a little nutty about backups... but I haven't lost a file in two decades and I don't want to start now ;-).