“A great little board that fits under the Pi allowing the addition of a NVMe PCIE Gen3 M.2 SSD. As it's underneath, it still allows additional Pi HATS to be attached to the Pi on top.
NVMe SSDs are significantly faster than SD cards (though the initial configuration has to be started from the SD card to set the EEPROM settings allowing booting/etc from the NVMe SSD).
A great addition to any Pi 5 setup.”
“Great little board, and for the price, I’ll have to buy a 2nd for one of my other projects now.
It does fit as a hat if you’re using the official Pi5 case, you just need some 20mm standoffs (but 22mm would be ideal).
Now to I plan to run my LLM from a 2TB m.2 drive.”
“Hooked up to my Pi5 with a 1 TB WD NVME and it works perfectly. I was previously booting from a USB SSD and getting ~130MB/s now seeing above 400MB/s.”
“Super pleased with my NVMe Base for Raspberry Pi 5, very easy to get up and running, I used the Pimeroni assembly video as my guide.
My unit runs with PCI gen three speeds and is configured as the boot drive.
I think the engineering of this board is really good, the flexible curved PCB allows the SD card to be removed easily, the M2 drive is easily accessible, but also protected, and the board is safe when on its base on a worktop, as practically no electrical connections are present.
Not only that, the unit is very reasonably priced and is very smart.
I would suggest, that if long bolts were made available (to go through the pillars), it would provide an excellent way for ad-hoc mounting of the board.”
“Despite the glowing reviews I am having issues with this board. Even though I'm using the official Pi 5 power supply, with this board and drive I get almost continuous errors that the power supply cannot supply enough current! Seems that the power supply can only power the Pi and not anything that may be attached, which is a shame and short sited.
I cannot boot from the NVMe. The Pi sees it when Pi OS is running, and an image can be flashed, but when I try to boot it just says /dev/nvme not found and boots from the SD card. It must be just me as everyone else seems to be up and flying without issue.”
“Success, I've just got Google m-key coral TPU to work with this board. I admit it wouldn't be possible without the excellent work of Jeff Geerling on his blog https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/pcie-coral-tpu-finally-works-on-raspberry-pi-5. but it goes to show how versatile adding pcie is to the pi 5”
