SSD to USB 3.0 Cable for Raspberry Pi

Description

After a lot of testing, we finally found an SSD (SATA) to USB 3.0 cable that works really well with the Raspberry Pi 4and Raspberry Pi 5**. Great for USB Booting or even just adding fast SSD storage for your media, documents and files.

This cable will accept a standard SATA SSD on one end and has a USB 3.0 connection on the other end for plugging into one of your Raspberry Pi 4/5’s USB 3.0 ports. It uses an ASMediaASM1153E/ASM225chip inside, which works very well with the Raspberry Pi and supports UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol) for fast transfer speeds.

In our testing, the adapter and SSD pulled around 0.2-0.3A from our Raspberry Pi USB port, which means you can easily add two of these (one per USB 3.0 port) if you need to connect multiple SSDs. Just make sure you’re using an official Raspberry Pi power supply(you’ll need the 26W PSU for a Pi 5).

Each cable is approximately 18cm end to end (may vary slightly with different batches).

We have a tutorial guide on how to use this cable and set up a new SSD for file storage including partitioning and permissions!

**A note on Raspberry Pi 5 usage

We tested this with a Raspberry Pi 5 and it all works perfectly. We plugged the cable+SSD into our Windows machine, used Raspberry Pi Imager to write the standard 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS to the SSD, then plugged it into our board with an official 27W official power supply.

BUT there are acouple of things that might trip you up if you’re running a different setup:

• If you use a different power supply, and the Pi 5 detects it can’t offer 5V 5A, it will show a warning at boot and stop you from going any further until you take action (see the image below). If you’re running headless, you may not see this warning, and you’ll just think it’s not booting properly.So always use an official 27W power supply when using these adapters!
• If you’re not using Raspberry Pi OS, we simply cannot guarantee compatibility and/or performance.

Here’s the boot warning you’ll see if you’re not using a 5V 5A power supply that the Pi is happy with:

Other usage notes

• We don’t recommend using this cable with traditional spinning disk drives (HDDs) as they draw too much power and don’t always work well (or at all) with the Raspberry Pi
• We do not state TRIM support as this can depend on the firmware on the chips from the factory (which varies between batches).
• We recommend using these cables with USB 3.0 ports for maximum speeds, however, they will work on USB 2.0 ports as well
• We recommend a direct connection to the Raspberry Pi USB ports. This item has not been tested when used via a USB hub
• We only recommend this with the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5. You can use it on earlier boards such as the 3B+ for storage, but speeds will be limited by the USB 2.0 ports (and the plug n’ play USB booting is only possible on the Pi 4 or 5)
• Raspberry Pi and SSD not included. Adapter cable only

Revision History

• As of 01/11/2021: Stock may now include units with the updated ASmedia ASM225 chipset, which from our testing works in the exact same way as the ASM1153E (and in some instances, appears to use the same firmware).
• As of 16/08/2021: We are now stocking an 18cm cable with the ASMedia ASM1153E chip.