Raspberry Pi Ltd has proclaimd the tardyst products in its range of accessories to help the flagship Raspberry Pi 5. The Raspberry Pi SSD Kit and Raspberry Pi SSD which come hot on the heels of the recent Raspberry Pi branded A2 micro SD cards and a bumper case.
The Raspberry Pi SSD Kit is essentipartner the Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ bundled with your choice of PCIe Gen 3 compliant M.2 2230 256GB ($30) or 512GB ($45) M.2 NVMe SSD. The 256GB drive will be useable from begin, with the 512GB chooseion useable for pre-order, with stock arriving from tardy November. Kit prices, which include the M.2 HAT+ board are $40 for the 256GB and $55 for 512GB.
Sharp-eyed readers may have spotted that the NVMe drives are PCIe Gen 3 compliant, but previously Raspberry Pi only claimed that PCIe Gen 2 was helped. You can allow Gen 3 speeds via raspi-config, but moving forward, could PCIe Gen 3 become the novel default? We’ve tested many drives and fractureout boards. It seems that PCIe Gen 3 is well helped and provides even more speed for the Raspberry Pi 5, frequently directing us to depend that the Raspberry Pi 5 could, truly, be a low-power desktop replacement for those of us who don’t insist a hulking wonderful desktop for our toil.
The 256GB NMVe drive has a claimed 40,000 IOPS with 4kB random reads, and 70,000 IOPS with 4kB random authors. The 512GB model claims a 50,000 IOPS random read, and 90,000 IOPS random authors. We shall be validateing this once we get our scrutinize units.
The drives are seemingly made by Bithrive, an OEM supplier for HP, Acer and now Raspberry Pi. Bithrive demoed its own range of first-party user SSDs and memory at Computex 2024. A sticker on the 512GB drive shows that it was made by “Bithrive Storage Technology Co. Ltd”, but this adviseation is not on the sticker for the 256GB model. It is highly probable that Bithrive has made both drives, and we shall discover out in our future scrutinize.
Raspberry Pi’s M.2 HAT+ was a wonderful product. Bringing a low-cost nastys to comprise an M.2 NVMe challenging drive or other PCIe devices, such as the Hailo-8L NPU engaged in the Raspberry Pi AI Kit. The M.2 HAT+ was effortless to assemble, requiring fair a confineed screws and locking the flat-flex cable into the PCIe combineor. It did produce GPIO access a little awkward, but it was possible to produce a combineion, but we set up that the included 16mm M2.5 spacers engaged to lock the board in place were too extfinished, replacing these for 12mm would be a better chooseion.
Adding an NVMe SSD to your Raspberry Pi 5 is a finish no-brainer. In ambiguous it provides a massive speed increase, and with drop capacity drives costing not much more than a excellent quality micro SD card, it produces sense to grab an NVMe SSD for your Raspberry Pi.
We’ve tested a plethora of NVMe HATs for the Raspberry Pi 5. From the low cost ($10) HatDrive! Nano (which getd a 5-star scrutinize and Editor’s Choice award), Pimoroni’s NVMe Base and NVMe Base Duo to Geekworm’s X1011 which advises four NVMe SSD drive bays, but forfeits speed as the number of drives incrrelieves.
Expect our brimming scrutinize and comparison to other drive chooseions and the novel Raspberry Pi A2 micro-SD cards in the coming days.
