X4 Portable SSD

My 6 month old Norwegian Elkhound decided this would make the perfect bone. I looked for my little drive for a few days. Then I had a thought cross my mind. Did the puppy bring this outside? Whelp a day later I decided I better check. I head out to inspect the yard. It had been thunder storming at that point for a few days. Finding all kinds of holes the puppy had dug filled to the brim with water. Mixing with the freshly over turned soil. Which made the contents of each hole kinda like a bad milkshake from McDonalds. While standing there in the rain going from hole to hole checking for my cherished little hard drive. All I could think about was how long it would take me to rebuild another drive with the data this one had on it. Especially if I ended up finding it in one of those dog made lakes. I was on my 4th hole before I saw it there in the lawn.... floating in one of my puppies secret cache of chewable goodies... My heart sank along with one end of the drive into the murky water. I reached down and picked it out of the doggie lake while the water poured out of the drive. I cleaned it up shook it to get the water out. I then left it to dry for a few hours. It wad now time to test and find out if I was buying another drive and start the rebuild of all my data. I plugged in the cable to the drive and started to push in the USB-A side of the cable into my laptop. I wad waiting to see some error while the laptop was trying to mount the drive.... but to my surpirse.... No errors.... could it be true? So I click on the drive it opens and I see all my files. ... but will they work? You bet it did!! I was watching my movies again without skipping a beat .... I have been using that drive now everyday since it was turned into the Titanic.... This is the Perfect little drive! Had to reformat to FAT32 upon first use but works great! Fast enough to stream movies straight into my TV USB A port! Tough enough to be chewable dog bone and go for a swim..... Love it!! DO NOT HESITATE TO BUY THIS DRIVE!! IT WELL WORTH THE PRICE!!

This drive is pretty speedy! I'm running my Raspberry Pi 4 from it, and I'm quite happy.Note that you can't BOOT the pi from it, but you can have the next best thing.... You can run your RPi from it, but you do have to do the initial boot from the SDCard. Once booted, though, all the disk access is on the SDCard.A couple of things to be aware of:1) This drive is a 4k sector drive. This means just burning an sdcard image with RPI Imager or Win32 disk imager WILL FAIL. They seem to expect 512 byte blocks. It just writes a corrupted filesystem to the drive.2) It works fine after boot.3) I tried everything I could think of, but the RPI4 will NOT boot from this device for some reason.4) Not all is lost - you can move your / filesystem to the SSD and gain the speed and durability advantages. You will have to book from the sdcard, however.I tried every way possible to boot from it, but could not get it to work. I even manually created a FAT32 boot partition and a copy of a root ext4 filesystem by hand, and it would not boot.Here's how I got it to work.Steps taken on the Raspberry Pi:delete original partition on the SSD and create new ext4 partition with gparted (gparted usually needs to be installed)mount the SSD ext4 partition (I used /mnt/target)copy the current OS partition to the newly created on on the SSD. (I used "sudo rsync -axv / /mnt/target"). This takes about 5 minutes on my pi4Bget the PARTUUID of the SSD ext 4 partition you just copied. (I used "sudo blkid" and found the PARTUUID for the partion on /dev/sda)backup /boot/cmdline.txt to cmdline.sdedit the /boot/cmdline.txt, replacing the PARTUUID with the one you just found for the partition you created on /dev/sdaXedit the fstab **ON THE SSD** and replace the PARTUUID for / with the SSID you just put in cmdline.txt. (I used "sudo vi /mnt/target/etc/fstab") Don't edit the regular /dev/fstab! Because of the change above, it will never bee seen. Again! Edit the fstab ON THE SSD filesystem you just created.reboot.You can confirm the device is running on the new SSD by using "findmnt -o -n SOURCE /" and it should show a partition on /dev/sdaHas been running OK for me for a while. Search raspberry Pi Forums for more information and detailed instructions.

I bought this JOIOT 500GB SSD drive to hook up for an additional backup drive. I never heard of this brand and the price is quite a value. I ran H2testw to verify that this drive is a real 500gb as they claim, the test passed. I then ran benchmark test to see if the speeds were close to their claims of: Up to 450MB/s read and 350MB/s write. Some benchmark and utility software have issues identifying the JMicron chipset used for this JOIOT drive. My initial benchmark testing came back terrible. I ran it again to confirm. I then decided to try and switch out the cable and use a different cable then what comes with the drive, huge difference. Using a different cable, the drive performs close to the advertised speeds. Using a better cable as you can see in benchmark picture attached, is about 2X-3X faster. Not sure why they would include a cable the under performs so much. The included velvet draw string bag really is a waste to include, samething you can get at any craft store. They should have included a better cable and skipped the pouch. The drive does run cool, has a small blue light. I'm going to hook this up for an additional backup drive and I'll adjust my review as I see how this drive performs over time. This drive is great value (so far). At the moment, I don't trust this drive with any data that I cannot lose. I'm just using it as an additional backup. That could change in time, but so far so good.