Ableconn PIUSB-M2S USB to M.2 SATA SSD Converter Stackable Board for Raspberry Pi

I have this card paired with my Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, installed in an anidees Aluminum Extra High Pi case. First off, good luck, that's what the instructions should say. They are absolutely useless/worthless. Second, if you are planning to hook this up thru the GPIO pins, you will spend endless hours trolling around the internet trying to figure out how to get it working. I put a 1 TB card on this thing, and if I assemble it with a USB cable from the PI to the card, it works fine with a formatted SSD. I had hoped to connect it with the GPIO pins to get around the unfortunate problem of not being able to put the cover on because of unfortunate placement of the micro USB port. So, what are my choices, continue the fight with the GPIO pins (already been 6 months of attempting this path) or, cut my case to allow access to plug in the USB cord......... This product is a great idea, but, it's not working out for me.

Ableconn PIUSB-M2S USB to M.2 SATA SSD : This is sort of device is the reason Dumpster Fire was added to Websters dictionary. The directions make zero sense and have no frame of reference. For example these is a jumper on the board that is used to set power, except its not labeled on what pins, when jumped, do anything. There are two Mini-USB connectors, but neither indicates which is for power, if jumped correctly, and which is data. I tried every possible configuration and managed to get a couple LED flickers. used multiple cables in case the included one was bad. Nothing Zip, yet I could use any other storage I attached. So on my Raspberry Pi 3 B+ this thing did nothing and sat there like a lump. No way to get around it, and no idea what is wrong. I then realized amazon has a great return policy, so back it went.

See attached image. the original description shows all traces pinned out. As you can see, that's not what you get.

Had to assemble the components from the Amazon pictures. The Ableconn web site doesn't offer anything better than the included hard-to-read paper "instructions". The unit didn't work at first. Emailed to the support team asking for advice. Haven't heard from the yet. The expected /dev/sda device wouldn't show up but something called /dev/sg0 would. After a few Google searches and various power cycles /dev/sda came up. Had to use "sudo fdisk /dev/sda" followed by " sudo mkfs -t vfat -I /dev/sda1" before I could use " sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/usb -o uid=pi,gid=pi". I am using an Adata 512GB 2280 stick and created a single partition (/dev/sda1) using fdisk. I may change that in the future. So far it has gone 24 hours of operations without a hitch. From the mechanics of it, the board fit nicely on top of my RPi 3B+. Don't care about the USB to micro-USB jumper cable but that's an issue with 90%+ of all RPi adapter boards. Maybe it is time for RPi to get rid of those four USB ports, replace them with the micro-USB version, and reclaim a lot of board space in the process.) The instructions for the external power jumper were confusing. I finally figured it out but this needs work. Hence why 4-stars, otherwise it would have been 5. Update: I received a response on the email I sent to AbleConn Support. They didn't understand the questions I asked. The response showed a picture highlighting the micro-USB connector; which was not an issue related to my problem. The also included a URL to raspberry.org showing the external storage configuration, something I had already seen before I contacted them and which didn't solve the problem. I would give them a 1/2 start for at least getting back to me.

Home Assistant users on Rasp Pis don't want to run HAOS on SD Cards so this is the perfect solution. The mSATA format is very low power consumption and the cost for mSATA drives is very low. This hat was a very easy install. The documentation is pretty terrible, but if you are plugging it right into the Rasp USB 3 port, you don't need to do anything with the jumpers. This was plug and play right out of the box. Case shown in photo is GeekWorm case for Rasp 4 model B.

Device is pretty slow for USB 2.0. It will not get the advertised "480 Mbps". I get 35 MB/s where I should be getting 55-60MB/s. I'm considering returning this as I can get something MUCH faster for the same price. Testing results. All test were from from the same Raspberry Pi 4b. Writing a 1GB file returns 35.5 MB/s ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- # sync; dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024; sync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 30.2697 s, 35.5 MB/s Reading that file from the buffer is 727 MB/s ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- # dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 1.47717 s, 727 MB/s Flushing the buffer then doing a read again is 34.2 MB/s ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- # sudo /sbin/sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3 # dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 31.3989 s, 34.2 MB/s I hook my m.2 SATA drive to my portable enclosure (search for B0892BK5L6) and these are my results. This proves the speed is not the fault of the m.2 SATA drive I'm using. Write ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- sync; dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024; sync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 3.86467 s, 278 MB/s Read from buffer ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- # dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 1.48953 s, 721 MB/s Flush buffer then READ again ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- # sudo /sbin/sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3 # dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 3.69636 s, 290 MB/s

This has a lovely A+ form factor that is sadly crippled by the cable needed to connect the board. The cable adds nearly 3" to the space needed for an A+ (and 2" for a Pi3B). The board could (and should) have been designed to use a flat USB connector bridge.

This is a great little device which helps get around one of the shortcomings of the Raspberry Pi. My application requires writing video surveillance events to disk, which is not ideal for an sd card. After popping in a 512GB Samsung ssd, I attached the device to my Pi 3, and nothing happened. An lsusb revealed no new devices. Since this thing is supposed to be plug and play, I did the only thing I could think of. I swapped the usb cable for another and then everything worked. Got it. Not all usb cables are created equal. Since I am a cheap skate, I must admit I first purchased some of the ultra cheap mSATA-USB adapters found on E-Bay. However, I got what I paid for, and I only discovered the Ableconn PIUSB2MSA after I went looking for something better than what I had. The Ableconn PIUSB2MSA isn't exactly cheap, but it does ship from the USA so shipping time is reasonable. The fact that it works, and works well, is enough for me to recommend this item to others. My biggest criticism is the fact that this board covers the 40 pin gpio header. The standoffs attempt to compensate for that, but then the assembly becomes too tall to fit into many of the Raspberry Pi cases out there. This issue is by no means a show stopper, but overcoming this is something I'd expect from a device that costs significantly more and claims to be made specifically for the Raspberry Pi.