Geekworm Raspberry Pi 3 B+ X850 mSATA SSD Storage Expansion Board for Raspberry Pi 3/2B

I'm using this as the only disk in my Raspberry Pi (no SD card). Attached the drive to my PC, formatted the drive FAT32, placed the NOOBS files on the drive, put the drive in my Pi, and booted up. Installed multiple Operating Systems to the SSD without issue. Reboots fine.The only complaint I have is that it is difficult (impossible) to remove the USB bridge while the Pi is the case that's designed for this. So swapping the SSD adapter between PC and Pi is a little cumbersome, but shouldn't need to be done once things are set up.No idea what the 'SSD Power' micro USB port is for. Never used it. Haven't needed it. Maybe some SSDs need extra power.

EDIT: This review is no longer valid, since the product has been updated multiple times and is not what I reviewed.Original Review:Got this to use a spare mSATA SSD on my Raspberry Pi3B and it works great with /boot on the SD card and / (root) on the SSD. When trying pure USB boot on the Pi3B it works when powering on the system, but restarts and shutdowns are unreliable. This is a common problem with USB boot on the Pi3B as its boot code is rather primitive and incompatible with a lot of devices. Leaving /boot on the SD card is 100% reliable (boot, restart and shutdown all work as expected).Leaving /boot on the SD card is also faster, because there is a 5 second timeout to check for a SD card before USB boot. So there's really no downside. The /boot partition is only written to during kernel/firmware updates, so there is very little wear on an SD card used just for /boot.So how does an SSD perform on a Raspberry Pi3? Pretty well, actually. Obviously you are not going to get the huge speed increase you'd receive on a computer with native SATA. Read/write will be limited by the Pi3 USB 2.0 interface, but there a number of other performance enhancing features that make SSD drives faster than SD cards, so it's a very noticeable improvement. SSD drives are also more reliable than SD cards, and far better to use as a computer OS drive.Also note that this is a USB 3.0 adapter, so you can use the included USB 3.0 A-A cable to connect it to a USB 3.0 computer to quickly image the SSD, and if future generation Raspberry Pi computers support USB 3.0 this adapter will be ready.EDIT: There is a new version 1.3 board which includes an additional power cable that connects to the Raspberry Pi GPIO +5V and GND pins, and that seems to have solved the reboot problem, but the included power cable does not fit the GPIO pins with bending them a little (the plug connector on the cable is too large).

Works fantastic! Really improved performance. I had a few rainbow/lighting bolt issues with my 5v 2.5a power supply so changed to a 5v 3a supply and all good so far. I'm using it with this ssd. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07864YNTZ

I finally tested this exhaustively, and I am tired of it.I kept fooling myself that I got a bad img copied or a weak power supply.Nope, the 256GB Zheino mSATA that I'm using works flawlessly via USB but EVERY time I use it mounted via this X850 expansion board I get a few minutes of operation then the system starts failing ALWAYS resulting in file system corruption.Again, note that the Pi3 B+ and the Zheino mSATA card work fine as long as the Geekworm X850 V3.0 USB3.0 board is NOT used.I lost $28 to these guys and I can not afford this any more.

I purchased this product to boot my raspberry pi 3b+ via a 500GB MSATA drive. This unit works great.