I used to have one Pi4 that had two USB-SATA adapters and two SATA drives hanging off it. It worked fine for a long time but a change to the OS gave it a single failure, changes can make a difference to peak power draw, I couldn't prove if it was a power problem or not.
Since then I haven't hung two SATA drives off any Pi without a powered hub on one of them.
For SATA SSD I highly recommend the Kingston A400's I've got a number of them in use and never had any problems with them, they work well with Pi's. You might be able to squeeze a few percent better performance from a Crucial or Samsung but not all of their drives are low power.
For the USB-SATA adapter, make sure it uses an Asmedia chipset. I generally recommend UGreen but PiHut do a cheap adaptor which I would now consider if I didn't have a box of adapters already.
For the powered hub I use Rishtek, it does the job but doesn't have a big power source.
If you are using USB drives, try to avoid any live USB switching, glitches happen.
Since then I haven't hung two SATA drives off any Pi without a powered hub on one of them.
For SATA SSD I highly recommend the Kingston A400's I've got a number of them in use and never had any problems with them, they work well with Pi's. You might be able to squeeze a few percent better performance from a Crucial or Samsung but not all of their drives are low power.
For the USB-SATA adapter, make sure it uses an Asmedia chipset. I generally recommend UGreen but PiHut do a cheap adaptor which I would now consider if I didn't have a box of adapters already.
For the powered hub I use Rishtek, it does the job but doesn't have a big power source.
If you are using USB drives, try to avoid any live USB switching, glitches happen.
Statistics: Posted by pidd — Fri Jan 23, 2026 9:05 pm