Does anyone have recommendations/experience of NVMe to USB3 adapters for
use with a Pi4?

I'm really looking for one that is a USB stick rather than a hat or other
large device. Thus the GeekPi one doesn't really suit.

One can find quite a few generic NVMe to USB adapters but I can't find
any that will definitely work with a Raspberry Pi (though in principle
they should as the USB interface is fairly standard).

I'm not after the absolute maximum speed, I just want to use a 'proper'
SSD (which I have) with my Pi4.

--
Chris Green
ú

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 18/10/2026 12:44, Chris Green wrote:

Does anyone have recommendations/experience of NVMe to USB3 adapters for
use with a Pi4?
I don't have one I have used on a Pi4 but would offer the following advice.

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
2280 form factor drive. It supports 10Gbps transfers and has a Gen3 1TB
device in it. It happily enumerates at 10Gbps and runs at 10Gbps, ISTR
800MBps transfers. It would be faster if UASP worked.

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

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 18/10/2026 12:44, Chris Green wrote:

Does anyone have recommendations/experience of NVMe to USB3 adapters for
use with a Pi4?

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

I have one of these cases:

https://thepihut.com/products/argon-one-m-2-raspberry-pi-4-case

It holds a Pi4, passively cools it (quite well) and takes an M.2 SATA
(not NVMe) SSD. There's a USB3 "bridge" (for want of a better word) that connects one of the Pi's USB3 ports to a USB3 port on the case.

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 *restarting* at which point it finds the SSD quite happily and will then
run quite stable for as long as I've been bothered to test it.

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.

--
Cheers,
Daniel.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> writes:

Does anyone have recommendations/experience of NVMe to USB3 adapters for
use with a Pi4?

I'm really looking for one that is a USB stick rather than a hat or other large device. Thus the GeekPi one doesn't really suit.

One can find quite a few generic NVMe to USB adapters but I can't find
any that will definitely work with a Raspberry Pi (though in principle
they should as the USB interface is fairly standard).

I'm not after the absolute maximum speed, I just want to use a 'proper'
SSD (which I have) with my Pi4.

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

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B097H7JZVG ?SSK M.2 to USB NVMe Enclosure
USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 SSD Enclosure Adapter Reader?.

I can?t conveniently test it with a Pi 4 right now because it?s in
use...

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 10/18/26 12:44, Chris Green wrote:

Does anyone have recommendations/experience of NVMe to USB3 adapters for
use with a Pi4?

I'm really looking for one that is a USB stick rather than a hat or other large device. Thus the GeekPi one doesn't really suit.

One can find quite a few generic NVMe to USB adapters but I can't find
any that will definitely work with a Raspberry Pi (though in principle
they should as the USB interface is fairly standard).

I'm not after the absolute maximum speed, I just want to use a 'proper'
SSD (which I have) with my Pi4.

I bought a Ugreen <https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09T97Z7DM> it never
really worked/or was very/very slow. Not just slow, I mean really,
really slow. Didn't work well on anything rPi5, rPi4, Windows 10, Orange
Pi 5, etc...


So, I bought an NVME pcie thing for the rPi5 instead, which does work. <https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CPLF6JYX>. I don't think I would buy it
now, as there are better ones, double slot etc.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 18/10/2026 20:56, Andy Burns wrote:

mm0fmf wrote:

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.

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

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 œ6.50 and the SATA one œ3.00.




--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 10/18/26 21:10, Pancho wrote:

On 10/18/26 12:44, Chris Green wrote:

Does anyone have recommendations/experience of NVMe to USB3 adapters for
use with a Pi4?

I'm really looking for one that is a USB stick rather than a hat or other
large device.ÿ Thus the GeekPi one doesn't really suit.

One can find quite a few generic NVMe to USB adapters but I can't find
any that will definitely work with a Raspberry Pi (though in principle
they should as the USB interface is fairly standard).

I'm not after the absolute maximum speed, I just want to use a 'proper'
SSD (which I have) with my Pi4.

I bought a Ugreen <https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09T97Z7DM> it never
really worked/or was very/very slow. Not just slow, I mean really,
really slow. Didn't work well on anything rPi5, rPi4, Windows 10, Orange
Pi 5, etc...

So, I bought an NVME pcie thing for the rPi5 instead, which does work. <https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CPLF6JYX>. I don't think I would buy it
now, as there are better ones, double slot etc.

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.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Sun, 18 Oct 2026 20:37:02 +0100, mm0fmf wrote:

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 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.

Curious to know, was Windows using UASP? Did the drive end up working
faster on Windows than on Linux?

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Thanks for all the replies, it does seem that things are not completely straightforward. A bit of trial and error may be needed.

--
Chris Green
ú

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 19/10/2026 04:54, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:

On Sun, 18 Oct 2026 20:37:02 +0100, mm0fmf wrote:

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 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.

Curious to know, was Windows using UASP? Did the drive end up working
faster on Windows than on Linux?

An interesting question. I was sure it was UASP on Win11.

I dug out and fired up the Win11 laptop (now I need to shower in
bleach!) This is Win11 Pro 25H2, Dell 7490 laptop i7-8650U / 16GB. The
Linux machine is identical hardware with Debian 13 updated yesterday.
Both have USB Gen 3.1 Gen .

The NVMe USB disk is ext4 and I can't access this on Windows but I have another USB3 to mSATA disk with JMicron controller. This is only 5Gbps
but has a 256GB FAT32 formatted disk and being mSATA is not as fast.

On Win11, DeviceManager says it's using UASP and on Linux, dmesg states
the VID/PID matched the quirks file and so it's using USB Mass Storage.

I copied a photo backup folder, 49GB, 11000 files from the disk back to
itself on both machines.

Win11 average transfer rate was 95MB/sec
Linux average transfer rate was 80MB/sec

For laughs, I tried the same experiment on an Debian 13 i7-12700 machine
with USB 3.2Gen2x2 and the mSATA drive. It too was USB Mass Storage not
UASP and it averaged 97MB/sec. It's a noticeably fast desktop.

That slow down between UASP and USB MAssStor fits with my experience
with many years as a USB designer.

The mSATA adapter was a massive œ4.50 from eBay and the mSATA drive came
out of a 2015 vintage laptop that was broken for parts.




--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 10/18/26 06:44, Chris Green wrote:

Does anyone have recommendations/experience of NVMe to USB3 adapters for
use with a Pi4?

I'm really looking for one that is a USB stick rather than a hat or other large device. Thus the GeekPi one doesn't really suit.

One can find quite a few generic NVMe to USB adapters but I can't find
any that will definitely work with a Raspberry Pi (though in principle
they should as the USB interface is fairly standard).

I'm not after the absolute maximum speed, I just want to use a 'proper'
SSD (which I have) with my Pi4.

Here are a bunch of them.



https://www.qwant.com/?client=ext-chrome-sb&q=nvme+to+usb3+adapter&t=images&o=0%3A7EB9F3A4086E1EAF9C3A4CB9641F0044AF045D33

I use a couple of variants with my Pi4's, and my Pi5's, and, they all
work, but, they can be tough on the power supply. Those ports are not
intended to deliver large currents. So, lean and mean.

Choose your NVME drives, and the adapters, carefully.

That said, these adapters produce good speed, and, and solid,
reliable data transfers, if power limits are not reached. They can be
quick and simple.

Someone recommended the cases from the Pi Hut. I use Argon 40 cases
for nearly all my Pi's. Quick and easy to set up, and, they work as they should.

One caveat, the cooling fan is controllable with a script added after
the device boots up. It's more or less specific to the Raspberry Pi OS,
and, allows programming automatic fan operation. But, it's less easy to
get the fan to work under other OSes. I run Fedora on most of my Pi5's,
and, my Pi4's, with Ubuntu on one of each, in Argon cases, and the fans
have not come on since I've been using them. But, the Argon cases are
fairly heavy black anodized aluminum, with direct thermal contact,
through thermal pads, on the CPU and GPU, providing more than adequate
heat sinking without fan support. CPU temps rarely reach 130F. And, I
work them like rented mules.

p

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)