Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[mrhyfy]

Hi,,
I have recently got my raspberry pi 3b running with MC 20. I'm using an attached 1 TB hard drive.
All seems ok!
I'm thinking of moving to a USB stick.  Is there any REAL difference between using 2, 256 GB sticks as opposed to one 512 GB stick?
Also,, would a common usb 3.0 stick be as good as good as a high performance USB 2.0 stick??

thanks for any advice!!

[glynor]

I'm thinking of moving to a USB stick.  Is there any REAL difference between using 2, 256 GB sticks as opposed to one 512 GB stick?

Depends on your computer, but almost certainly not unless you buy fancy USB3 sticks (and even then it would be iffy). It would depend on the USB bus and controller. If the ports on the Pi use only a single controller (which is likely but I'm too lazy to look), then a single 512GB stick would be preferable to two. Probably easiest to manage with just one as well.

Also,, would a common usb 3.0 stick be as good as good as a high performance USB 2.0 stick??

This will depend much more on the USB3 controller on the Raspberry Pi than the USB stick itself. I certainly wouldn't buy a USB2 stick on purpose, that's for sure. Worst case, if it turns out the USB3 controller/drivers you have there are flaky, you could force the port into USB2 mode.

Wirecutter likes the Sandisk Extreme USB3 drives:
http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/the-best-usb-3-0-thumb-drive/

I have one too. It's nice (and super fast).

[AndrewFG]

I guess that no matter what kind of USB stick you buy, your Pi will be able to pull media data off the stick N times faster than it needs to deliver the data to the audio player; so I doubt that you would notice much difference anyway..

[mwillems]

Some notes on the specific hardware limitations of the pi:

The usb bus is USB 2, not USB 3, so the difference between a USB3 and USB2 stick on the pi will not be relevant in this application.  Additionally, the Pi's single USB bus is shared across all the USB ports and is also shared with the ethernet adapter and one or two other subsystems.  So any devices using the bus will share a bandwidth bottleneck. In practice this means that even USB2 devices do not typically reach maximum speed on the pi (due to overhead and other devices), and using two or more USB2 devices would not yield any benefit as the two devices are just splitting the same bandwidth that is unlikely to even saturate a single device.

So my advice is to find a single USB device with a tested read/write speed at or over 50 MB/s and the device will never be your bottleneck.  If you find it's still too slow, reduce ethernet traffic 

[glynor]

The usb bus is USB 2, not USB 3, so the difference between a USB3 and USB2 stick on the pi will not be relevant in this application.

When connected to the Pi. If you ever need to load content onto it using a different PC though...

If there was a price-premium for USB3 flash disks, I might be more ambiguous on the answer. But since any price difference between them is now neglible-at-best, I'd still opt for a USB3 drive that will be more flexible if you ever need to mess with it elsewhere (or upgrade your Pi to a new model in the future).