Boosting Raspberry Pi Desktop experience with SSD

While my sleek SanDisk Cruzer Fit was great to give me the initial insight into Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop, it is so sluggish that seriously deteriorates user experience. As a matter of fact, this SanDisk Cruzer Fit USB 2.0 flash drive is so slow that it even fails Raspberry Pi Diagnostics badly. At the same time, Raspberry Pi OS has recently made booting from USB officially supported on Raspberry Pi 4b.

As both of my laptop and the Raspberry Pi 4b supports USB 3, it made me look into investing a bootable USB 3 solution. In these investment investigations, I usually try to find the cheapest solution on Amazon. I have found for £10 a 64 GB M2 2242 SATA SSD that fits into a £20 USB 3 enclosure. While it sticks out of my laptop much more than the SanDisk Cruzer Fit did, the responsiveness it offers made me stick with it.

Just for the records, I have run Raspberry Pi Diagnostics on this new SSD drive both in my laptop and in the Raspberry Pi 4b.

Here are the results in my laptop:

Raspberry Pi Diagnostics - version 0.5
Sun Oct  4 18:13:59 2020
Test : SD Card Speed Test
Run 1
prepare-file;0;0;156410;305
seq-write;0;0;163024;318
rand-4k-write;0;0;16137;4034
rand-4k-read;16773;4193;0;0
Sequential write speed 163024 KB/sec (target 10000) - PASS
Random write speed 4034 IOPS (target 500) - PASS
Random read speed 4193 IOPS (target 1500) - PASS
Test PASS

Here are the results in the Raspberry Pi 4b:

Raspberry Pi Diagnostics - version 0.5
Sun Oct  4 16:11:35 2020
Test : SD Card Speed Test
Run 1
prepare-file;0;0;157538;307
seq-write;0;0;161418;315
rand-4k-write;0;0;49461;12365
rand-4k-read;48259;12064;0;0
Sequential write speed 161418 KB/sec (target 10000) - PASS
Random write speed 12365 IOPS (target 500) - PASS
Random read speed 12064 IOPS (target 1500) - PASS
Test PASS