Adding NVMe Storage to your Raspberry Pi 5 - No more SD cards!!!

One of the great benefits of the Raspberry Pi5 is access to PCIe. This means that the Pi 5 can use (and boot from) NVMe storage. In this video I show you how to add M.2. SSD storage to your Pi 5 using the NVME Base from Pimorani.
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[@tonysheerness2427]

The advantage is you can have a large storage space without external drives. Have they built a proper case to fit the bottom hat and the cooling fan with the lid on. That would be the icing on the cake.

[@xellaz]

I'm using an Nvme hat instead from Geekworm and I have ordered a case for it that should be able to fit everything (hat included plus the Nvme heatsink). That case is out-of-stock now. 😅

[@Lurch-Bot]

The disadvantage is that you have to buy a hat to have the capability. I just canceled my RP5 order and getting an Orange Pi Plus, which is what I was going to get before I got sucked into the RP5 hype. RP5 also has no built in NPU so I can have a Coral TPU or I can have NVMe. Seems they are a day late and a dollar short. I have a problem with a company that cannot meet the demand for their products and the couple of stock updates I got suggested I would have to wait until May to get an RP5. I ordered the last week of November. It is already not looking very attractive on the basis of features. Basically will serve as a console emulator for most people and a less than stellar one at that. You can get a 16GB Orange Pi Plus for around $170 including case and power supply. It has two 2.5GB Ethernet ports, an onboard, full length M.2 slot that doesn't stick awkwardly out the side of the board. It also has a Wi-Fi card slot. It also has double the core count. I would have spent that much on the RP5 by the time I got all the extras to do what the Orange Pi can do out of the box. It will also run drives a lot faster than an RP5. Double the bandwidth. An IPO is about the only thing that will get their lazy butts moving to meet demand. Still, nobody seems to want readily available, cheap Pis.

[@tonysheerness2427]

I hope your orange Pi works and does everything you want it to.@@Lurch-Bot

[@xellaz]

@@Lurch-Bot I get you. I ordered mine around November too and got it 1st week of January. With all the upgrades, it all came down to $300+ (the 2TB Nvme SSD is $100+). I looked up Orange Pi Plus and like you mentioned, the specs sounds awesome! Two things that I would worry about though are software availability and support for it. On that, it can't match a Raspberry Pi. Despite enjoying my Pi 5 a lot atm, I do feel some regret getting it--mostly because I spent more than I would want to with all the upgrades. For the same amount, I feel I should have gotten a decent mini-PC instead. In fact, I did get a mini-PC recently. A Beelink SER 5 with 16GB RAM and 500GB Nvme SSD storage using a Ryzen 5700u. This mini-PC runs circles on my Pi 5. With a USB 3.2 to 2.5GbE adapter, I was able to get 2.5Gb speeds on it. I also used a DP 1.4 to HDMI 2.1 adapter and now it can do 4K @ 120fps. With a little tweaking in the BIOS power settings, the CPU now draws 2.3-2.6w on idle and about 10w when playing 4k videos and doing office tasks. The max power draw I get is about 21w when stressing the CPU+iGPU with benchmarks. I don't see this at all with just regular use. So yea, I'll just go for a mini-PC on my next one. They are more powerful, easier to upgrade, and can be configured to draw less power depending on which CPU you choose. I'm using my Pi 5 as a server atm running Debian headless install and CasaOS as a docker dashboard manager. I'm liking the performance a lot especially with the fast pcie Nvme SSD I put on it. Software support and tutorials online are plentiful for it too so that made my life easier when troubleshooting stuff. But will I get another Raspberry Pi again in the future? Maybe not if the price just keep increasing and the availability is scarce. Most likely I'll just go for another lower power efficient mini-PC. Anyway good luck on that Orange Pi Plus! I hope it works out for you! 👍

[@andrina118]

Cool that the PCIe cable is angled so you can still access the slot easily - unlike the pineberry for example

[@nArgari]

Unlike the Argon v3 too :(

[@brad7904]

I just bought an nvme pimoroni hat from their site and a couple of banger 256gb cards on Mercari thanks to this video. Can’t wait to boot it up when everything gets in!

[@RonLaws]

It seems like the best system function that would benefit the most from an SSD would be Swap space, if you have a task using up a lot of RAM then the SSD would be a plus here since swapping on an SD Card is 💀

[@gtk-m2x]

I'm running a RPi5 + this nvme hat as my daily driver PC and it works amazing 🙂

[@HometownUnicorn]

Are you okay Gary? It looks like you're in a warzone, do we need to send help!

[@GaryExplains]

🤣

[@DudeSkinnyTall]

Looks like recent pics from Gaza

[@avigdonable]

Come on, guys, stop spamming comments, let Gary explain!

[@test40323]

Nice demo. Question: which is better, a raspberry pi 5 or a chromebook?

[@GaryExplains]

Depends what you want to use it for. A Pi has GPIO bins, which a Chromebook doesn't have. A Chromebook is portable, which a Pi isn't. And so on.

[@test40323]

@@GaryExplains , I'm finding desktop apps less and less necessary these days. A student may need portability but a retiree just need something that has the chrome browser and doesn't become obsolete in a few years. i.e. can one actually get away with living with a thin client? Thanks.

[@BillYovino]

I would love to see a comparison running Ollama on a MicroSD vs NVMe. Running it on the SD card is very slow but if there isn't a significant difference I won't bother with the added expense.

[@nakfan]

Which case fits best with this solution? Maybe a subject for another video…

[@10100rsn]

When compiling you might need to set the number of jobs it can compile at once to really get the bandwidth up, but how depends on the build system being used.

[@GaryExplains]

I did. I used -j4.

[@10100rsn]

@@GaryExplains Yeah, probably just can't saturate it this way.

[@GaryExplains]

Exactly.

[@daveac]

Not got to the end yet - but don't you need to expand the image to take up all of the NVMe storage? Thanks for all your videos

[@GaryExplains]

No. I am not 100% sure how that it resolved, but either the Pi Imager program handles that or it is done on the first boot. Either way, you get the full disk size.

[@DaveJones-Waveform]

@@GaryExplains It's done on first boot by the installed OS; while rpi-imager does have some post-flash customization steps for those images that request it (SSH keys, initial user passwords, wifi passwords, etc.) it doesn't handle partition/fs resizing. I'd guess this is probably because there's so much variation in all the images, it would require that rpi-imager bundle all the tooling necessary for all the fs' in use (ext4, btrfs, etc.); whereas the installed OS must necessarily have the tooling available for its own rootfs, and almost every fs commonly in use these days permits online resizing, so it's easier to just "let the installed OS deal with that".

[@CyberDunk2077]

I couldn’t get raspberry pi OS to see more than 2tb, even when manually expanding storage in config. I have a 4tb drive I was trying to use.

[@DaveJones-Waveform]

@@CyberDunk2077 This is likely because RaspiOS is using the older MBR partitioning scheme in their images (which has a limit of 2TB for partition sizes). The Raspberry Pi bootloader *can* understand the newer GPT partitioning scheme (which would permit larger sizes) but only on more modern boards IIRC, which is probably why they're sticking with MBR for now. However, if you're happy tinkering with partitioning schemes (convert the drive to GPT, expand the root partition, then the rootfs) it should be possible to achieve this.

[@CyberDunk2077]

@@DaveJones-Waveform Cheers

[@An.Individual]

The cost of a Raspberry Pi is starting to add up now.

[@GaryExplains]

You mean the cost of the base unit or the cost of adding different bits like NVMe?

[@johnsimon8457]

Raspberry Pi is really an ala carte system. If you’re running a headless os - You can power the pi off of a tablet charger without active cooling. If you need a desktop replacement… things are different

[@jameswhite1450]

I'd like to see a video on booting a PI5 NVMe with Kali. I'm using the Geekworm X1002 board.

[@saifal-badri]

Awesome video, for me will keep using my usb 3 storage boot. It would be nice to see same numbers for that too!

[@AnonYmous-kf7uu]

Is the Raspberry Pi 5 more responsive with the m.2 drive? Running from the micro SD card, it’s so laggy.

[@johnsimon8457]

Guessing this REALLY needs the 5A official pi5 power adapter. Even a Mac book power adapter which is meant to power a much more powerful system doesn’t supply 5A because it doesn’t support a special high power usbc mode. A C compiler is going to be CPU limited but I wonder about node or ruby, which reads and writes a ton of when it builds and runs. Maybe Linux has a disk cache that puts a bandaid over the slow sd card performance? 8 gb is a lot of ram so I wonder how well docker runs?

[@inkysteve]

What's the difference between a sata SSD on the USB port compared to NVME?

[@DavidJones-hd1jj]

Benchmarks suggest 3 to 4 times faster than my Samsung T5 through USB 3.

[@h.e.hazelhorst9838]

How does the nvme ssd compare to an USB3 SSD? Like the Samsung T7?

[@coolParadigms]

Excellent explanations, thanks! By the way if you have some information about passive cooling for the Raspberry Pi 5 with NVMe Storage I'll be watching straight away!

[@captmulch1]

I’ve also been booting a Pi 4 from USB connected 128 gig SSD.

[@roysigurdkarlsbakk3842]

I hope you cleared the cache between the first and second tar. If not, the first would be significantly slower, since it actually read something, while the second would just read everything from cache… sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3 does the job

[@GaryExplains]

There was no "second" tar. To move from the SD card test to the NVMe test requires a reboot from a different disk.

[@hammockdweller]

I regularly hear that a NVMe or SSD drive is more reliable than a SD card especially when there is a lot of IO. I didn't have any problems with my Pi's on that respect. What's your opinion?

[@GaryExplains]

Yeah, like you, I have never had an SD card failure, but I haven't used the cards with many intensive IO operations. For my NAS setup I use a Pi and an external hard drive, so most of the IO is on the hard drive.

[@meru_lpz]

I've experienced a lot of SD card failure back when i depended on it to expand phone storage - ended up with lots of corrupted mp3s, unreadable photos, and files whose checksum wouldn't match against other copies! A decade might have passed since then, but i still wouldn't trust it 😅

[@meru_lpz]

(And yes this happened to me with multiple cards and in multiple devices, not just one faulty unit)

[@NNokia-jz6jb]

Care to make a video about your HD pi NAS? ​@@GaryExplains

[@GaryExplains]

I did! Two in fact! Try kzbin.info/www/bejne/hV6pl4KNmb90h5Y and kzbin.info/www/bejne/bpeslpyQrZmppbc

[@Bobbylopezcreative]

You don’t mention probably the best use case for expanding to fast and large storage and that’s for a media server. This would be a great replacement to a streaming device where you can store all of your favorite media.

[@Da_GrandiMan]

Dear Gary, I went whole hog (Pineberry bottom) on this (Nvme PCIe connector & Drives) 😮 and got them both (Pimoroni too). All bottoms ! But they were both tricky to set up. It took 4 "SD cards", & plenty of coding and re-coding in terminal. Just to get the Pineberry up and running (so sweet). Then once my PiMoroni came in yesterday n I got nothing. I Tried to troubleshoot it (switching 8 GB Pi 5's X2 - Nvme 2280 M.2 key 2280 SSD cards) too ! And then, I lost all of the PCIe/ Nvme connections to the PI's. Now neither Pi will recognize the SSD drives. (Not sure if the Pimoroni bottom hat or WD blue SSD 1TB ever worked). Where can I go for help ? (Patient Forum's "name's ?", Sellers or Mfg's ?). I am a "Pi Nut", since getting a Pi 2b yrs ago. Since then, I got the jump on the other Pi's, " Z, W, 3B, 4 8GB, Pi 400 & 5 8GB". (Incl. Early Camera). All I want is, my pi5's rolling like the original SD card Pi5 was, last Saturday. Can anyone steer me, to anymore more detailed vid's ? I've used up "EC & Jeff G's", tips & tricks. I need detailed, step by step. To get my Pi 5's running @ full potential, again ! Anyone ? & Thx ! (In advance) ☺️😄😊

[@lutrueson9000]

If the pi has a PCi connector could it potentially have a mini GPU?

[@neilmackinnon5573]

I have the Geekworm X1001 NVME PI 5 hat. I am running Kali Linux off of my SD. Can I boot Kali Linux off of my NVME. It is recognizing my new NVME now as it was recognizing my WD SN 530 (driver issues I believe).

[@diniconights]

Can you try if there would be any problems if you use this setup with 5v 3a powering it. I REAAALYY need to know that

[@georgedandrade-hp1gds296]

Is this possible with Raspberry Pi 3 or Raspberry Pi 4B?

[@HyyskanPolttaja]

Thanks for the video Gary. I have a "Kingston PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2" 250GB SSD drive lying around. Is this suitable for use with Pimorani / PI5? I'm asking because this drive did not work with Bmax mini-PC. Something to do with PCIE / NV -standards or whatever...

[@GaryExplains]

There is a list of tested drive on the Pimoroni website, the Kingston KC3000 is on the approved list. The KC3000 is "PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2". Check the web page for more information on compatibility.

[@HyyskanPolttaja]

@@GaryExplains Thanks Gary, will do.

[@Squic83]

Is the sd card still usable after nvme update?

[@RafaCoringaProducoes]

sugestion for a video: in the news there is an announcement of new microSD with SSD speeds, i wonder if it is compatible with pi 3 4 5 and the cost benefits of it

[@GaryExplains]

If you are referring to Samsung's announcement then I covered SD express back in 2018 kzbin.info/www/bejne/laqoe4yDiaicpqc

[@HJBTRADES]

Setting up a minecraft server on my pi 5 8gb and wanted to see how to connect an m.2 drivw, thanka

[@RossPotts]

@garyexplains when you started messing about with the SSD setup, did you have any issues with the system locking up? I have the hat from geeekpi, and it has been problematic, but only when I set the pi to boot from SSD. If I leave it as just a rather large file system, I have no issues whatsoever. Now I have to figure out how to revert the boot order. I assume I can just boot off the stable SD image and change the order back using raspy-config.

[@GaryExplains]

No, I didn't have any problems. Check with geeekpi to see if your SSD has been tested with its board. I know for my board there is a list of "don't use" SSDs.

[@RossPotts]

@@GaryExplains yeah, been checking in-between meetings today. Aaaah, dammit! I think lspci just revealed my problem. It’s got a Phison controller. I know those are supposed to be not the best after watching a couple videos. I’ll just keep it for now as a non-boot disk controller and get a better one in a month.

[@JonandKristy]

Is there a way to load andriod lineage 21?

[@bertbrecht7540]

Glad you folks in Europe have ample stock of the RP5. RP Foundation decided the US was not a valuable market, ahead of its IPO, and nearly cut off supply including all their sad US suppliers with long 4 month waiting lists. Oh well, I am happy moving to mini-PCs for my projects.

[@AdrianOakley-d8t]

Did not work for me with a samsung 960 drive.Went back to external ssd on sata adapter.

[@gravgazli]

Hi! Do you think a SSD NVMe of 4tb will work with pi ? If yes do you have some brands exemples ?

[@GaryExplains]

There is a section on the Pimoroni website about drive compatibility.

[@jyvben1520]

might test it with usb video file , kdenlive rendering, write to nvme, one day, could test it with 2 usb drives

[@ayellowbeard]

This is probably a dumb question but while I know games are processed by the graphics chip would an M2 drive make any significant difference in game load times on something like a Retropie using an RPi5?

[@GaryExplains]

Yes, for loading times. But not too much especially for retro games as they are quite small. But overall an NVMe system feels faster because the disk read/write is much faster.

[@ayellowbeard]

@@GaryExplains Thank you! Given that the board itself is fairly inexpensive I might pick one up and wait until I have an M2 to pop inside which could be pretty soon! Cheers!

[@ayellowbeard]

@@GaryExplains Thanks and I went ahead and got everything setup using an 1tb M.2 drive and I really like how snappy the loading is and having that amount of space I feel I can pretty much put anything on it I want!

[@briandowdell358]

Can you not just write the OS disk image directly to the NVMe and boot it from there after mounting, then editing the config.txt to boot to the NVMe?

[@briandowdell358]

Can you run the firmware updater from another source?

[@lostbranchranch8646]

Do you have any tips on partitioning the NVME for optimal use?

[@danieltkach2330]

How can I install Kali Linux on the nvme?

[@robertlee6338]

Why

[@stevehopper6068]

How about putting some links to possible SSDs?

[@GaryExplains]

There is a list on Pimorani's website. That list is authoritative.

[@xoxide1017]

i have yet to get mine working under ubuntu

[@1MinuteFlipDoc]

GMKtec Mini PC instead! cheaper and more capable! (the RPI needs a lot of add-ons).

[@GaryExplains]

Does the GMKtec have GPIO?

[@almeidainf]

11:59 - Goodbye SD cards! 12:00 - To flash Pi OS, grab an SD card. 😅

[@3dtexan890]

Still not available in the US.

[@ElsiervoDePeFKNerre]

Y me pregunto si sirve para correr un nodo de bitcoin? Alguien que me pueda ayudar a entender si sería eso posible, se lo agradecería pues estoy empezando en este mundo de las raspberry pi 5 y llegue a ellas por que quiero tener mi nodo de bitcoin pero por ningún lado se encuentra información. P.S buen video en calidad de imagen y audio más el contenido muy bien explicado, muchas gracias Gary por compartir. Regran from Puerto Rico

[@GaryExplains]

Unfortunately the Pi 5 is not powerful enough for modern Bitcoin mining. Today you need specialist hardware for that or a PC with a very big (and expensive ) GPU.

[@HablaConOwens]

All we need now is a respectable APU from AMD.

[@galihpa]

Raspberry Pis have become so expensive that it's not worth it anymore, I'd rather buy something like a used Dell Optiplex for my home server, it's cheaper and has a lot more computing power

[@GaryExplains]

Yes, many people share that sentiment. I have a video here on this channel about using a second hand PC as an alternative to a Pi. Of course, the older models are still available at lower prices. To be fair to the Pi, i don't think it was ever intended to be a home server. Having said that I use a Pi 3 as a NAS server. It has been running for a couple of years without incident.

[@BremerFischkoop]

... and NVMe is a more reliable storage. I already killed some SDCards and USB storage sticks.

[@HFH-Official]

How the heck did you kill those sd cards? 😂 wear and tear I assume?

[@doronsandroy3917]

It not work stak all the time

[@jkn8932]

Cool

[@kevinshumaker3753]

Thing is, I haven't used an SDCard on any of my Pis since the Pi3B. I have only used USB to boot / run from. I have USB sticks and USB SSD drives of sizes 512MB to 2TB, and all work with RPiOS (although the larger drives have to be manually expanded after first boot). I started 'back in the day' because of the expense of burning out the SDCards due to r/w cycles. This is nothing new, just the hat to get the M.2 port...

[@GaryExplains]

Are you are saying that USB is the same as NVMe? 🤔

[@kevinshumaker3753]

@@GaryExplains No, speed diff is pretty good, but, would it have killed them to not make NVMe or SATA hat dependent? Put an M.2 NVMe or SATA on the back side like several other SBCs did when they saw the advantage? The ribbon is 'mice' for other PCIe uses (which can take advantage of a hat...

[@xellaz]

I really wish the Pi 5 has a 2.5GbE Ethernet option or even a USB3 Gen3.2 so I can connect a 2.5GbE Ethernet adapter to it. 🫤 But yea, I'm using a Geekworm hat with a 2TB Crucial P3 Nvme SSD on my Pi 5 and it's fassssst! 😁

[@GaryExplains]

Which version of USB 3.2 do you think you need? Isn't the Pi 5's 5Gbps USB speed not enough for 2.5GbE?

[@xellaz]

@@GaryExplains The USB3 to 2.5GbE adapter I got from Amazon specifically states it requires USB 3.2 Type A or Type C (Thunderbolt 3/4) to work. The Pi 5 only uses USB 3.0 unfortunately. This 2.5GbE adapter I got works great on my mini-PC that didn't come with a 2.5GbE connection. I also used a Displayport 1.4 to HDMI 2.1 display adapter on it so now I can do 4k @120Hz via HDMI. 😁

[@GaryExplains]

One thing to remember is that USB 3.0 and USB 3.2 gen 1x1 are the same thing. Have you seen my video on USB naming? kzbin.info/www/bejne/fJ-moHSCd5aXmbcfeature=shared

[@xellaz]

@@GaryExplains The USB to 2.5GbE network adapter I got doesn't work well with the Pi 5 unfortunately. Someone did comment it wasn't the adapter but a software issue on the Pi 5. I'll try to test this again in the future.

[@MADBONE0]

Intel Optane Memory M10 SSD M.2 2280 16GB MEMPEK1W016GA PCIe 3.0 3D Xpoint NVMe $9 eBay 🫡… 🤔 q depth 1 😅 💡 ⚡️