Ultimate Raspberry Pi 4 Rig: M.2 SSD & ICE Tower

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers calm this time I'm going to equip a Raspberry Pi for with my preferred cooling hardware and a boot SSD in order to create my ultimate razz be PI for rig now inevitably I think this video is going to be a bit of a journey of discovery as we iterate towards the final solution and I hope in the process of going on this journey I'll pass on some useful ideas and information so let's go and get started right to build my ultimate Raspberry Pi full rig I'm going to be using this 8 gigabyte Raspberry Pi 4 and the cooler will be a this which is the ice tower from 52 Pi which is the best cooler I've ever tested for a Raspberry Pi 4 so even got a heat pipe in here as well as the fan will be using proper thermal compound to fit it on top of the pie will go on the something like this let's put it on there just to show you roughly where it fits in place and in the test that underpasses has been by far the best cooler you could fit on a Raspberry Pi for but it isn't the most practical as you can see and but there is now a nice tile caller that mounts like that which is more practical but I particularly wanted to use this one because this really I'm going to build is not going to be a closed rig or to stress up from the start I want to build an open rig it really showcases their components and that this is a fantastic component to showcase and indeed for quite some time I've wanted to build like a sort of steampunk Raspberry Pi rig and this I think this rigs me to go in that direction anyway that's gonna be the cooler and I also want the Raspberry Pi for to be booting from SSD because we can now boot from USB 3 we should take advantage of that and in the past when I've used an SSD with a Raspberry Pi I have used a something like this this is a kingston two and a half inch SSD and i've connected to the beep I using a something like this which is a USB to SATA adapter and this would just plug in somewhere like this at the end like that we just flick it across this would go into their their ass beep I and that works perfectly well and you might remember in previous videos I've built a little board to mount things like this it works perfectly fine but you do have this rather large loop of wire at the end between the adapter and the pipe it all sticks out quite a bit and I'd like to build a rig it's not quite as a cumbersome as this and so my plan is to use an MDOT 2 SSD and dot 2 SATA SSD in this rig and to somehow have it mounted and connected very neatly to a USB 3 port on the Raspberry Pi I'm not exactly sure how that's going to happen right now but that's the plan anyway you've now seen my starting point so I think it's now time for me to do a little shopping greetings Here I am back again it's now a few days later and exciting things have started to arrive now well I've done projects with a Raspberry Pi in the past I've often bought little packs like this of standoffs for mounting things but for this project I've gone completely wild and water this which is a whole box of a M 2.5 brass standoffs M 2.5 means the threads on these standoffs are a 2.5 millimeter which is deciding you for working with a Raspberry Pi it can be a bit difficult to get but I've managed to get hold of it and of course I will give you links in the video description to everything I'm using here and alternatives because some of these things are slightly obscure anyway let's open this thing up great little latch even makes a great noise doesn't it this sort of sounds Makery and exciting these are give us all sorts of possibilities for mounting things up all sorts of lengths and sizes here which is really good so this is a great starting point but what else have I been buying well for start I bought this which is a WD green 120 gigabyte n dot 2 SATA SSD so let's get inside this I think we just need a stand there when I to give us a little bit of help to open up on top there we are and there it is it's going to be in some kind of a yes thing like that and there we can see over m dot 2 SATA SSD and you're probably thinking how am I going to connect that to a raspy pipe well the solution I hope is going to be this and this is an external housing for an end to SATA drive with a adapter to coming through to a USB 3 as you can see so I'll Drive or go inside here and that will plug into the Raspberry Pi but you're probably thinking already Chris that's rather a sticky out thing we put this into a Raspberry Pi it would look something like this that is not not ideal is it no so I'm gonna try and find a way of actually getting this mounted under the pipe rather than neatly and one the way they might try and do this is using these or at least things like these which as you can see our adapters which route the wiring out of a USB plug at various angles so for example this one is USB 3 and takes the cable downwards so we could take our Raspberry Pi like this and plug this in like that and we've now got the cable going up under the board on the Raspberry Pi which is a bit need to inherit things sticking out the front and I had hoped to use an adapter like this which is a really cool little device which takes USB through 180 degrees but sadly this is only USB 2 and on the PI at least it'll only take it upwards but you could actually fit this I'll just show you it would actually work we could put that in like that we could plug in our thing like that and that's a perfectly valid combination this will actually work Howard I would think should work except for the fact that it's only got a USB 2 connection on this which is rather a shame isn't it and I can't fit it under the board but at least you can see here the sort of things I'm thinking about with these sorts of cables I can imagine I'm going to be taking these cables apart doing some soldiering taking this thing apart as well and also doing some soldiering to it make everything work for our ultimate Raspberry Pi Thor rig right I see I'm now in the mood for a bit of construction and so let's put the m dot 2 SATA SSD into this USB enclosure and that I think was just for screws to remove on the top there we go and I think now this panel just there it is and in fact we can now lift out the circuit board as well and I think we have to go yes to the other side to find the thing to fit the drive and we have to first loosen this little retainer like of that and the drive if we just flick it round get it in that the right place will flick into the thing like that and will flick under there if I got it right like that then we'll just screw it into place and there we are we've mounted it on there that's a nice and straightforward we think actually a case back like that that fixed like this that goes in there and we can flick the top back on the wall back on the top and there we are we've now effectively created ourselves say a rather fast USB Drive Emily there's all sorts of uses of things like this I bought this to go like oh oh I should be making loads of these think what you could do with loads of these in your your kit of computer parts anyway this is for ultimate ride with pi4 rig and earlier I fitted the ice tower onto the the Raspberry Pi 4 and just to fasten it all down into place went under very nicely and as you can see I've also added a few standoffs while I had them I thought I might as well put them in place just gives us an idea where things might end up there with some top plates and base plates here eventually but for now let's go back to our MDOT - SSD which by the magic of filmmaking now contains a copy of raspberry pi OS and will insert it into the the PI like that which would probably be rather a and balance of little work just about we can add in our keyboard and our mouse as well and yes it's not gonna be balanced but it'll work and I can now go and turn the thing on there we are it's come to life and yes there were lights in the mice towers fan and hopefully the pie will now boot up yes there we are we've got the familiar for raspberries appearing on the screen always very reassuring to thee before as but on the screen as the Raspberry Pi is a booting up and in a second we should arrive in real time yes into a Raspberry Pi Oh s and just to prove we're running from the m2 SSD let's just do an LS b okay this block devices we can see there yes we've got our SD is the SSD 120 gigabyte and now I've formatted up starts working clear very nicely and I should say I had a little bit of messing around to do to get the pipe booting from this and onto SSD initially i imaged raspberry pi OS to the SSD using etcher and it wouldn't boot but then I went into the Raspberry Pi itself booted from micro SD card and I used a copier down here in accessories the SD card copier to copy the micro SD card to the SSD and that worked which is a little bit bizarre but I just thought I'd let you know I had to do that whilst we're here in the terminal let's also just run the naquadah sitting there HD parameters let's test the speed of the the drive which should be pretty good of course it's an SSD connective i/o sp3 what's he gonna give us all excitement oh it's giving us a two hundred ninety three point two six five megabytes a second a lot more when we get from an SD card plugged into it a raspy pie and if you want to know I'll just plug in a micro SD card there we are it's come in I say yeah a media okay and we'll Lister go away I don't want to do this out Deary me I wish computer were to stop trying to be clever its list of lot devices again that sitting there down there so let's tell just to rerun HD parameters using that device there we go it's a can't actually identify the ax drive whereas why we get the arrow that's not a problem but we see we get at a speed of what forty forty-one megabytes a second so significantly less than the the SSD and this of course is why I'm choosing to buuut my ultimate Raspberry Pi for wig from an SSD and it's great to see it is now clearly here all working so it now has to be time to face the more difficult Hardware challenges of this project right at the start of the video I told you that this was going to be an iterative voyage of discovery and this is exactly how things are turning out what we're looking at here is what I imagined by Ultrabook pythor rig would end up looking like some of the parts are made out of paper at the moment these are templates for parts to be made out of brass will come to those in the next section but the critical thing here is I've got a right angle USB 3 connector a plug going down with its wire feeding directly into the MDOT two enclosure which is sitting beneath of Pi with the SSD in it and this was always my plan to keep things nice and neat like this to have a right angle connector and the SSD neatly below the PI but unfortunately after a great deal of experimentation several days trying to make things work I cannot make this particular set of work looking exactly like this which is a real shame if we look what's going on I've taken a right angle USB 3 lead like this and I've cut it in two and stripped back the wiring so here we have the twisted pairs for USB 3 data transmission and reception and we have the power wires and we also have a legacy USB 2 data wires and over here we have the m dot 2 adaptor which used to look like this but which has had its connector removed and if we look inside my plan here had been to solder the wires from the flow we were just looking at these wires here at Hunter solder mister pants he'll more accurately to these little pins it still remained on the top of the connector there and in theory it was a great idea I had worked out all the wiring and I had a plan for replacing the shielding but sadly I just cannot get this to work in practice in part I just don't have the right tool for the job to work on something this small but even if I did the power leads here actually wider even stripped off like this than the actual pads they go onto so I don't have could solder them on without actually having a short there and even if I couldn't I had better tools I also faced the challenge that my eyes just will not cooperate to do work of the this this really detailed work and I tried lots of different combinations of my close-up glasses my reading glasses and magnifiers I just can't work comfortably on something this side so I can't get this to work and so I've had to revert to plan B and so rather than looking like this my ultimate Raspberry Pi for wig is going to look more like this where as you can see I've got a right angle USB 3 plug going up voice this time with its cable so - a socket which plugs into a a nice newer and dot - SATA SSD adapter which sits underneath we can hold it in place but we will have this loop of wire which I really wanted to avoid it's not brilliant but err I can't find a way out of that I've been experimenting with all different types of connectors I've had all sorts of connectors I bought so I've looked at hundreds online I can't find a way of doing this unless I guess you actually built a little circuit board with surface mounted components which would fitted to do the bridge between USB 3 and their enclosure for the SSD anyway that's the way things are sometimes you have to accept things not being quite as you anticipated there would be when you start it out so I say well now move on to a place here bits of paper here with some nice shiny bits of metal right here am back again with a two millimeter brass sheet which I'm going to use to make the top and the base plates for the pie form rig and if you're wondering I purchased this from eBay which is why you buy everything you can't get from Amazon I initially designed the parts in the free Inkscape drawing package but I looked at a few videos back and which are used to export DXF files my idea was to send these files to an online service to get the parts produced by laser cutting however perhaps due to the current state of the world this is not proved possible and so I'm going to ask Henry Lea hacksaw along with Donald wood drill and Freddy the file to help me shape the metal in the old-fashioned way and some considerable time later here we have our final parts were mounted on the rig along with Thea SSD and as you can see I decided not to round the corners of the plate as I had got in my initial design which were going to be a laser cut and it is fair to say that the quality of the metalwork on the cutting here is a not ideal and in part this is because this whole video seems to be cursed and it's also though what happens when you decide to do a quick bit of metal work on your kitchen floor this said I'm still pleased with their the end result I think it's got a great steampunk feel to it with it or all the brass with the pie and heatsink and things I think it looks a really cool it's almost got a sort of a Babbage s look hasn't it with the parallel brass plates on the computer clock those very early mechanical computers a little bit anyway in terms of their fill and if you look right at the end you'll see that below the right angle USB adapter that goes down to the SSD I've put a new USB a USBC adapter and the reason I've done this isn't that all type-a plugs will fit in below the right angle connector but this will take any USBC connector it's also worth noting that this whole thing is really heavy this is the heaviest Pi rigger I've ever handled it's because you've got lots of brass on it Chris that must be the reason and I like a really heavy pikes it means when you plug in all the wires when you plug in all the cables the thing stays where it and talking of which let's get this thing connected up and then turned on there we are we've now got their ice tower fan come to life we can get their full effect of our rig with their blue LEDs and as I'm sure some of you were thinking this rig really ought to be great for a bit of overclocking and so that is something I'll be trying overclocking the Raspberry Pi for in this rig in a future video so there we are I built the ultimate raspy pi4 rig well okay I probably haven't built the ultimate vastly pi4 rig I haven't even built the design I hope to build the start of this video but I'm still pretty pleased with the result I've got my Raspberry Pi formal mounted up with a nice bit of brass and the ice tower cooler and booting from and then got to SSD and I hope that the process of constructing it and showing you what I've done has given you some useful ideas but now that's it for another video if you enjoyed but you see no police bestowed like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 313,111

Keywords: steampunk raspberry pi, Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 4 rig, ICE tower, Raspberry Pi ICE tower, raspberry pi steampunk, Raspberry PI M.2 SSD, Raspberry Pi M2 SSD, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, Raspberry PI 4 boot SSD

Id: HIYZwsc19CU

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 26 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/squiregeek]

msata's, like M.2's are underrated for Pi projects. They fit nicely under a Pi on standoffs and reduce the project's footprint. I've been using them for a few years and no problems so far.

[u/Mizerka]

that's cool, but when you're adding m.2 and tower coolers, you have to think at some point it'll be easier to just get an itx instead with ARM limitations.

[u/reni-chan]

I really wish there was some official non-hacky way of adding NVMe drive to raspberry Pi 4. Or maybe Raspberry Pi 5 should have it?