My Raspberry Pi Case Now Has An M.2 SSD - and It's Way Faster!

foreign I've been using one of my Raspberry Pi's in my case with a wrap around acrylic panel for the past few months one of the things that's been missing is an SSD I don't mind using a Micro SD card for tinkering with the part and for switching between operating systems but when I start using it a bit more regularly with the same OS then I prefer to use the faster and more reliable storage medium I used an M SATA drive in my last case and that's been doing well but this time I thought I'd try an m.2 solution The Shield I'm going to be using is an m.2 ngff shield from geekworm that supports an m.2b key SATA SSD with a 22 by 80 form factor I chose this board because it seems like one of the most widely available SSD Shields and is reasonably priced selling for around 30 depending on where you buy it from a number of people in the comments on my last SSD build asked why I didn't use a faster nvme Drive that's because there really won't be any speed benefits the bottleneck in adding an SSD to a Raspberry Pi is what the pars USB 3.0 ports which only supports a maximum speed of around 600 megabytes per second this aligns pretty well with what you can expect from Asado or imsata SSD but is why under an nvme drop speed which can typically be over 3000 megabytes per second while the price of nvme drives has been steadily decreasing until they're the same price or cheaper than Setter ssds there isn't really any point in using the monopod I'm using a 240 gig SSD which is way more than I really need for my part but was a few dollars more than 120 gig one to cool my power I'm going to be using an ice tower I used an ice cube cooler in my previous build and I actually prefer this cooler as it provides cooling to the USB and ethernet controller chips as well I also feel like it's better quality I only have one of them at the moment though and it's still installed in my previous case so I'm going to be using the ice tile for this build so to fit the SSD into the case I raised the Raspberry Pi's Port cutouts and move the ventilation cutouts higher as well I also made some changes to the standoff positions enlarge the sensor USB port cut out for the jumper and move the fan up a little to clear the part there still seems to be enough Headroom for the ass Tower so let's get it printed and see if it fits [Music] while the case is printing we can make up the acrylic side panel this is just laser cut from a piece of two millimeter clear acrylic to bend the acrylic panel I'm again going to use an acrylic bending tool this heats up a line between the two notches I've cut out on the side panel once the acrylic has been heated we can then use the side profile of the case to bend it [Music] next I'm going to install the pi and SSD let's start by installing our SSD onto our SSD Shield this just plugs into the socket and is then held in place with a single small screw supplied with the shield next I'm going to secure some six millimeter brass standoffs onto the bottom of the case using some M 2.5 screws that come with the ice tower if you try this Boulder for your Raspberry Pi make sure that you use a set of six millimeter standoffs for these the ones included with the SSD Shield are longer and these will cause your pass ports to not be aligned with the car starts in the case foreign we can then put the SSD shield into place on the standoffs and hold it in position using the longer brass standoffs that came with the SSD Shield then we can hold the Raspberry Pi in place using the standoffs that come with the ice tower or Ice Cube kit foreign it looks like our ports are all positioned correctly within the cutouts so let's get our style cooler installed I've already installed the legs on the bottom of my cooler so now I'm going to remove the fan from the cooler to mount onto the side panel rather foreign to hold the fan onto the side panel we need to press some M3 nuts into the pockets on the front of the fan this is easiest to do by laying the nuts down on a flat surface and then pressing the fan down over them we can then hold the fan in place using some M3 screws through the acrylic side panel I'm just using the screws that we're holding the fan in place on the ask Tower now let's plug the fan into 5 volts and ground if you're using a pwm fan like this one then you can either leave the pwm pin disconnected or plug it into a GPI pin to control the fan I'm going to plug it into gpio pin 14 which is the one next to the ground pin this way I can turn it on only when I need it I don't like using these fans with a pwm speed control script because they're actually more noisy when they're slowed down for silent fan you're better off using a good quality nocture fan the top cover is held in place with some M3 by 8 millimeter screws but hold off on doing this just yet if you haven't prepared your SSD to finish it off we just need to plug in our USB jumper and then put the 3D printer cover onto it before closing it up if you haven't already flashed your operating system image onto SSD there are two easy ways to do this one is to use the USB a2a cable and plug the shield into your computer then use Raspberry Pi imager to flash the operating system image directly onto the SSD the second if you already have your power running on a Micro SD card is to boot it up with the micro SD card plugged in then use the SD Card Copier utility to copy the micro SD card to your SSD then remove the micro SD card and reboot your part if you need help with this I've got a separate guide on booting a Raspberry Pi up from an SSD which I'll link in the video description now that we copied the micro SD card it's booted up and see our SSD performs I'm just going to run the built-in micro SD card speed test this will test the speed of the SSD if the pi is booted up from it foreign if we open up the results we get a sequential write speed of just under 200 megabytes per second which is a substantial increase of the 10 megabytes per second required as a pass for the test we also get a random route speed of 9199 iops IOP stands for input or output operations per second which is also way over the target of 500. and a random route speed of 10 632 iops so those are really good results and they're much better than what you'd get from even a good quality micro SD card our Raspberry Pi now boots up faster and will be a lot more reliable going forward let me know what you think of this modification to my case in the comment section below and is there anything else you'd like to see me do with the case design [Music] thanks for watching please remember to like this video If you enjoyed it and subscribe for more Tech and electronics projects tutorials and reviews [Music]

Channel: Michael Klements

Views: 194,749

Keywords: SSD, Ice Tower, Ice Cube Cooler, Raspberry Pi, Pi 4B, NGFF, 3D Printing, 3D Printed, 3d Printer, Ender 3 S1 Pro, Ender 3 S1, Gweike Cloud, Gweike Cloud Pro 50W, Laser Cutting, Laser Cut, Raspberry Pi Case, Speed Test, Creality Ender 3, M.2 SSD, M.2 SATA, Raspberry Pi Shield, Cooling Fan, solid state drive, creality ender 3 s1

Id: GE_8MURePbo

Length: 9min 19sec (559 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 05 2022