Help for Power supply & SSD with the Argon ONE M.2 Case

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Hey Guys,

Need help on choosing the power supply and SSD card for the Argon ONE M.2 Case Argon ONE M.2 Case Australia

  1. For the SSD, will Kingston A400 120G Internal SSD M.2 2280 SA400M8 be a fine with the case?
  2. For the power supply, will Raspberry Pi 4 Power Supply (Official) - USB-C 5.1V 15.3W be enough with SSD and raspberry pi? (no other components will be added)

Reason for asking read few articles that the official power supply won’t be enough for raspberry with the SSD. Also Argon has power supply with the following specs;

Argon ONE Raspberry Pi 4 USB Type C Cable Power Supply | Type C Fast Charger | 3.3 Feet Long | UL Listed 18 Watts 5.25 Volts 3.5 Amps USB C Cable Power Adapter

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Hi Husey,

The limitation is power consumption of your SSD, I think I’ve found the OEM product page for that SSD: A400 Solid State Drive – 120GB–1.92TB - Kingston Technology

If the information on this site is correct for your drive (you should check this is right), it should be fine. That page states the max power consumption as 1.535W - well under the upper limit of ~4W available from the USB port of the Pi. It’s only an issue for high performance SSDs that can sometimes require nearly 10W.

You can see the nominal and typical power requirements of a Pi 4 here:

Note that while the Pi can supply 1.2A max from its USB ports, in practise this is not practical to achieve. Keeping the limit for a single device down to about 0.8A (hence the 4W) still leaves enough headroom for things like your keyboard and mouse.

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Thanks, Oliver for the quick response;

According to the stats/spec, I will be all good with the official raspberry pi 4 power supply, like won’t using any keyboard or a mouse. It will be just server hosting the following;

  • Grafana
  • Traccar
  • Databases, collecting from another pi zero devices.

Or do you guys supply another supply for the pi 4?

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Hi Husey,

Honestly, the official Pi Supply is over specced. You would need to have every single port and GPIO pin maxxed out, and the processor going full tilt to get near that 3A limit.

For what you’re doing it should be more than enough, and have plenty of headroom left to spare. Sounds like the first bottleneck that you would hit is the current the Pi can provide via USB, and even that is a long way off (You SSD max of 1.5W @ 5V is only 1.5 / 5 = 0.3A).

Check out this video + article Graham did up when the Pi 4 was first released, he maxxed it out at 1.12 Amps:

And this stress testing article is also handy:

Long story short, from what you’ve said, you’re perfectly safe with the offical supply. Time to start digging into setup guides so you can hit the ground running when your gear arrives :slight_smile:

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@Oliver

Once again, thanks for your insightful reply.

Can’t wait till I receive my new gear :wink:

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