“If it works it works great. Nevertheless, from a technical viewpoint it is a fragile solution, PCIe was never meant to be used this way.
Of course there are some things to criticize: the M.2 screw is very fiddly. Or the fact that you must disassemble everything to exchange the SSD. But this has only some minor impact initially because you won't swap the SSD all the time unless you are are tester or benchmarker.”
“Super kit, at a competetive price for the greatest single board computer of 2023/4. Pimoroni products are always well made, realistically priced, perfectly implemented and supported. The base was easy to setup following the online video, which even shows the best way to handle connecting the fiddly bit (ribbon cable). My Pi5 now has 1TB of lightning fast NVMe storage before the official NVMe kit arrives. Better still there is normal access to the GPIO pins for other HATs etc. SPOT ON.”
“Looks and feels really good, it's built well and mounting hardware is good quality. I still haven't been able to boot from an SSD, but reading and writing data with the NVME base works really well. Can't wait for Pimoroni to release a compatible case!”
Ahoy Brian
Sorry to hear that - if you drop us an email at support@pimoroni.com with some photos of your setup and as much info as you can about what's not working and the steps that you've followed we'll do our best to help.
“The installation process was only complicated by the skeleton case I'm using - it has a passive and active cooler, as well as the RTC battery. Because of how the pimoroni fits underneath, there aren't really any good full cases that can accomodate it (yet), and to make it work I had to buy a set of standoffs with m2 screw heads to make it fit together properly, but now I have a fully functional PC that's the size of a deck of cards. Insallation process was super simple - the cable is good and gives space to add/remove an SD card, and easily slid into the PI end (though took some finagling to get the pimoroni end seated properly). I simply used the SD card copier to copy my OS across to the terrabyte SSD - a Lexar NM790, which isn't on the officlal list, but seems to be working fine. I have not yet tried the gen3 speeds, but that's next on my list.”
