“The NVMe board for RasPi 5is a well designed and well executed to add NVME SSD boot capability to the RasPi5. The board package includes everything you need to complete the installation. Instructions on how to proceed with the installation are found on the PiMonorni website as well as a number of entries on YouTube. The board works well with the different sizes of NVMe SSD's and the hardware can acommodate any of them.
The only challenging aspet of the installation is connecting the ribbon cable. The connetion that could be troublesome is made easy by following the instructions and treating the cable as fragile.
All-in-all I found this product to perform as expected and be easy to install. I nowboot fom an NVME ssd rather than a miri SD card.”
“I had absolutely no need for instructions to setup this. But for those who needs it, it comes with supplied instructions, it so easy even a n00b can do it. "Setup an RPI5 - its so easy even a n00b can do it".
And what an performance, Lighting fast.
I recommend everyone to buy this , its so worth the money. When it comes what brand of nvme disk you shall choose, take a look in the Drive compatibility list before purchasing and hunt for some real good deals.”
“Great instructions. was worried about connecting the cable but clear instructions on how to connect each end of the cable made it easy. My NVMe wasnt listed on the website but it was the only one I had so tried it. Fantastic results and even better than piomoroni's own benchmark with the same one at https://pibenchmarks.com/benchmark/79453/ My results in the attached jpg
Super happy customer! and hey - it crossed the pond with incredable speed!”
“I am now able to boot the OS from the SSD. There are no performance issues whatsoever. Above all, the design of the product is excellent, and I have become a huge fan of PIMORONI!”
“Works as advertised, had to boot Raspbian from the SD 1st to configure and then was able to image my NVMe with Ubuntu from Raspbian OS then remove my SD.”
“The NVMe Base for the Raspberry Pi 5 is working perfectly and was super simple to get up and running. To get a RPi5 to boot from the Pimoroni NVMe Base is easy. Once the Base is connected via the ribbon cable provided, power on the RPi5. The first time it will boot from the SD card as you have nothing on the NVMe yet and don't have the RPi5 configured for nvme boot yet either.
Once configured per below, my WDSN770 256GB was able to achieve 752MB/sec Read, 451MB/sec Write. For comparison the fastest SD cards on the market at the time of this writing are only able to get ~400MB/sec of read and ~200MB/sec of write. There are even faster nvme M.2 SSDs out there, but even my run-of-the-mill model is more than twice as fast as the best SD cards when loaded into the Pimoroni NVMe BASE.
To boot from NVMe run: sudo nano /boot/firmware/config.txt
# Add to bottom of /boot/firmware/config.txt
dtparam=pciex1
# Note: You could also just add the following (it is an alias to the above line)
# dtparam=nvme
# Optionally, you can control the PCIe lane speed using this parameter.
# Officially only RPi5 only supports Gen2, but Gen3 has worked for me.
dtparam=pciex1_gen=3
CTRL+O, ENTER to save. CTRL+X to exit Nano (editor)
then set the boot order: sudo rpi-eeprom-config --edit
# Change the BOOT_ORDER line to the following: The Numbers are read right to left, 6=NVMe, 1=SDCard, 4=USB
BOOT_ORDER=0xf416
# Add the following line if using a non-HAT+ adapter:
PCIE_PROBE=1
CTRL+O, ENTER to save. CTRL+X to exit Nano (editor)
Shutdown and reboot with no SD card present to test that it is booting from the nvme.”
