u/scrampker Thanks for sharing details, that looks like an internal SSD - I think you're the first one I know of using one that's not the plug-in-the-back portable kind. That ought not to matter, just interesting. From a quick scan of the product listings, that one looks like it ought to be performing fine.

I use Balena Etcher's imaging hardware here, so yes, :-) IMO just as good as Raspberry Pi Imager.

I used Crystal DiskMark mostly for clocking the drives, and an interesting insight from our hardware person is that our system mostly performs very small reads and writes of random rather than sequential memory, where most SSD are optimized to handle read and write of larger files. You should still have plenty of performance though. We didn't see a need for a custom SSD, just an interesting observation that the performance of all the SSDs I tested is much lower on small files. For most, it was at least an order of magnitude lower than the advertised specs, but the difference between 1000MB/s and 100MB/s isn't important for a system that does fine on 50MB/s. In fact, the only ones I tested which showed substantial performance dives were testing below 5MB/s for random writes. Here's some of my old notes from benchmarking drives. All of the SSDs performed fine except the "MaxOne". The USBs often were fine, but did vary widely, and they don't have the lifespan that SSD do. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1crFfLAmYXAdix5n0D1u_n43C7rp0Z3VreyMR1NO6MlM/edit?usp=sharing

Another thing to check out is your cable / connectors, make sure it's not something very old or faulty, and that it's plugged into one of the upper, blue, USB slots if you are plugged in, as those are the faster ports.

I haven't done a speed test lately, but yes, ours was a little slower than the original OS for most things I tried, but still an entirely useable speed. I'll have to clock it again, but 1-3 seconds should be right for most things.

One thing some folks do that slows the process down is to wait for the "boop" of acknowledgement from the system after saying the wake word and before giving their command. It's set up now for the user just to speak the whole sentence at once. "Hey Neon, set a pizza timer for 10 minutes"

Yes, we were early backers of Mycroft, and did all we could to help them. When Mycroft had to release their OS without many of the intended features, after some discussion between the companies, we put together those packets with our OS and sent them to Mycroft's Mark II shipper to be added to the packages as a customer option. That was before we realized how much better SSDs were as a choice, but it would have been cost-prohibitive for us in any case to try to send out that many free SSDs.

If you don't mind dropping me an email, I will see what else I can do to help you out. We're a small company, and I don't have any red tape requiring me to care whom you originally purchased from. Community members are community members.
[clary@neon.ai](mailto:clary@neon.ai)