“Did not come with complete hardware. There were no hex stand off spacers to attach to the NVME board. There may be other missing parts, but have not taken inventory. Shows lack of attention to detail and is disappointing. This was my first purchase ever from Pimoroni and the impression is not good. If made whole, I might change my impression, since no company is mistake free, good companies fix their errors promptly.
Update: After bringing this to the attention of customer service, they responded and shipped me some new hardware, which I just received. Bravo! Standup customer service! While I was waiting for the hardware, I managed to get things working with a Samsung 980 1TB NVMe. Seems to be slightly unstable at Gen3, but works rather well at Gen2. So I now rate this at 4.5 stars.”
“The circuit board is missing an optional offer from you for a matching case or a matching base plate for a common case.
Zur Platine fehlt ein optionales Angebot zu einem darauf abgestimmten Gehäuse, oder einer passenden Bodenplatte zu einem gängigen Gehäuse, von euch.”
“Works ok for the most part still testing it out with my samsung 980 pro. There are a few errors in dmesg
[ 1044.362082] pcieport 0000:00:00.0: AER: Corrected error received: 0000:00:00.0
[ 1044.362094] pcieport 0000:00:00.0: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Corrected, type=Data Link Layer, (Receiver ID)
[ 1044.362098] pcieport 0000:00:00.0: device [14e4:2712] error status/mask=00000080/00002000
[ 1044.362101] pcieport 0000:00:00.0: [ 7] BadDLLP
[ 1048.389703] pcieport 0000:00:00.0: AER: Corrected error received: 0000:00:00.0
That I'm trying to work out.”
“The NVMe Base for the Raspberry Pi 5 is a perfect fit using the mounting kit supplied with it. There are a number of things to note when completing the installation:
Make sure that the eeprom firmware is up-to-date so that it recognises the NVMe board. The latest version that works is January or February 2024. This is best done using the Rasberian OS rather than under Ubuntu. The Raspberry Pi Configure should be run to do this. It is also better to set the boot order to microSD first followed by the NVMe so that if anything goes wrong with the SSD on boot, the microSD will have priority. It can also re-program the SSD using RPi Imager.
NB:
When editing the config.txt file,
Include the following under the [all] section
dtparam=pciex1
This ensures that the NVMe board is “visible” to the system.
To force the system to use Gen 3 speeds for the nvme interface, add also:
dtparam=pciex1_gen=3
(This might be unstable but it worked for me.)
To getter a better insight into interfacing an NVMe board, look up Jeff Geerling’s blog:
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/forcing-pci-express-gen-30-speeds-on-pi-5
The only thing missing is a case for the RPi 5 that includes the extra height of the NVMe board. Keepi nagging Pimoroni and they will get hold of some.”
