Using a Raspberry Pi 5 with an SSD - It didn't go to plan! New NVMe M.2 HAT+

Raspberry Pi have released their new NVMe HAT+ which allows you to connect a SSD through the PCIe connector on a Raspberry Pi.

There are also third party boards that do the same. I decided to try with the Pimoroni NVMe Base compared with the Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+.

Unfortunately, it didn’t go quite to plan and I spent much of my time trying to work out what went wrong. The video below explains why it went wrong and how I fixed it. It then goes into the review of the Pimoroni NVMe base and the Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+.

In summary. When buying an SSD make sure you buy one that is NVMe and NOT SATA.

Another useful lesson is that it's not always user error, it could be a faulty Raspberry Pi.

The Pimoroni BASE is a great design, but does not fit the standard Raspberry Pi cases
* If buying the Pimoroni base consider buying with a drive from their website for guaranteed compatibility
* This can accommodate the physically larger (and often cheap) 2280 drives
* Easy access to GPIO pins

The Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ fits the Raspberry Pi case, but doesn’t fit larger SSDs
* Fits 2230 and 2242 drives, but not 2280
* You may need additional M2.5 screws
* Make sure you buy a M.2 NVMe SSD with M-Key

I spent a lot of time troubleshooting the problem to find why it didn't work. Fortunately I had multiple Raspberry Pis, multiple HATs and multiple drives which made it easier to narrow down the device had a fault. It was much easier because I had a good working NVMe base with working NVME SSD, so I was able to use those in combination with the different HATS, drives and Raspberry Pi.

For more information see: https://www.penguintutor.com/nvme

For an example of NVMe working see:    • Raspberry Pi NVMe SSD with Pimoroni P...  

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:45 Raspberry Pi 5 PCIe
01:37 Ordering an NVMe Base / HAT
04:11 Pimoroni NVMe Base - it works!
05:07 It's an SSD, but not NVMe!
07:44 More problems
08:11 The Raspberry Pi is faulty
09:36 NVMe base vs M.2 HAT+