“Great order and came within 2 days and well packaged in a little box. The board iitself is a great little board. Easy to install and works out the box with the Pi5. Comes with all the fixings to join the 2 boards together. I'm currently using a cheap fanxiang M.2 SSD - 512GB SSD from Amazon and getting:
/dev/nvme0n1p2:
Timing O_DIRECT cached reads: 864 MB in 2.00 seconds = 431.37 MB/sec
Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 1288 MB in 3.00 seconds = 429.31 MB/sec”
“Works great once I got it set up, I found the clip on the base a little awkward. You have to ensure it goes back the whole way before you can get the connector in properly”
“Don't let the SD card be your bottleneck!. Easy to install and setup.
I did 2 PI 5s in ten minutes. I also used a Hynix gen 3 NVME. Unleash the power of your PI-5. Boot up is very fast. I also have the dual NVME as a portable NAS.
Also the ability to use your Amazon account to purchase made it a breeze to order.
I would recommend!”
“The base itself is a fine design. It works as expected, and the result is an obviously faster computer.
The limitation and reason why I found it to be less than ideal is due to how the Raspberry Pi 5 implemented the PCIe connection for use with a ribbon cable. For young people, it would be fiddly; for an older person like me, getting the ribbon cable into those Zero Insersion Force connector sockets is a real trial.
When the ribbon cable is eventually inserted properly, it is far too easy to knock out of position. This virtually demands an all-enclosing case be used to protect the cable.
Furthmore, the result has quite difficult access to the MicroSD slot, and I tend to use my Raspberry Pis for trying different operating systems.
These issues are not the fault of Pimoroni, indeed so far the NVME Base is the only M.2 adaptor board to use a cranked ribbon cable, so MicroSD access is far better with this board. And this is why I bought mine. But seating the ribbon cable into the connector on the NVME Base is still hard to achieve, so I would suggest an easier to use connector for that ribbon cable. If that is possible.”
