“2-stars because some of the supplied hat spacers are defective and it's impossible to find the screw thread. Unfortunately, once a RPi 5 is mounted in a PiBow case with the active cooler, then the M.2 hat+ is installed, with 2 spacers that are not defective, I would prefer not to have to take it apart... The 2 diagonally opposite spacers will have to do.
I recommend confirming that all the supplied spacers and screws are not defective before installing the hat.
Despite the mechanical installation problem, the M.2 has works very well with my MP600 MINI 1TB (Gen4) PCIe x4 NVMe M.2 2230 SSD.”
“First official Hat that I have used, excellent equipment, especially when adding an NVME drive.
Blistering quick reading at 800+ Mb/s
Very impressed.”
“Easy to install (cut & paste commands into a terminal window) & adds a nice bit of storage to your Pi ! Fast delivery from The Hut. Just really need to find a VESA case with a decent fan for it all. (the one in my pic the top now doesn't fit :-( ).”
“The good:
- nvme is lightning fast
- no more SD card failure angst
- nice idiot-proof PCI-e flexi-rigid connector
The bad:
- you need to upgrade to the active cooler
- short nvme drives are rare
The ugly
- the stock case won't shut
- the supplied screws are too short when using the holes in the stock case bottom”
“Performance is great with the M.2 HAT+... but...
It's a bit disapointing that after so much time the official SSD option came with such poor quality spacers and a design that don't even work well with the official case. I seem to be missing the screw to hold the card in place too.”
