Two PCIe-to-USB bridge chip solution to use NVMe SSD on your Raspberry Pi 4

As we all know that one of the important improvements in Raspberry Pi 4 is its USB 3.0.

RPi4 doesn’t have an m.2 socket for SSD, but we can use an adapter to turn NVMe to USB3, like this:

In the past two years, the PCIe to USB bridge chip solution for NVMe was basically dominated by JMicron’s JMS 583. But recently, Realtek, the second-largest chip manufacturer in Taiwan, also introduced a USB 3.1 Gen.2 to PCIe 3.0 × 2 bridge chip with the name RTL9210.

As we can see, JMS583 is more complicated, and there are more peripheral components outside.

According to the reading and writing speed test, the same SSD uses the two different solutions, the speed is almost the same. However, the RTL9210 has a lower temperature and supports the sleep function without reading and writing, which greatly reduces the heat generation and power consumption.

The information reference and pictures of the article are from Zhihu@sdcam

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