“I bought the 512GB version, and I'm using it as the only storage on my Pi (no memory card). I was able to set it up easily, and didn't need any firmware updates or configuration changes (on a newly bought Pi 5) to have it recognised as a boot volume (by default, the latest firmware will look for an SD card first, then NVMe, then USB. Once running, this can also be changed with raspi-config to boot from NVMe first).
Note that these drives ship blank (a good thing!) and if you want to use it as a the boot media you can format it either through the Pi (which will require having an SD card to boot the Pi from while you download + burn the image to this drive), or using an NVMe enclosure to burn an image from another computer (sadly Pi Hut doesn't currently sell any, but I found the SABRENT M.2 NVMe Enclosure worked well for this — if you need an enclosure, note that these drives are "M-key", not "B-key" - different enclosures have different compatibilities).
I tested the performance of the drive using Raspbian's bundled diagnostics tool and it exceeds the advertised values (but note this is being run on a brand new card! Performance will degrade with use). On my 512GB card, it reported a random 4kB read speed of 112k IOPS (447MB/s) - twice as good as the 50k IOPS advertised; a random 4kB write speed of 96k IOPS (382MB/s) - slightly better than the 90k IOPS advertised; a sequential write speed of 400MB/s; and a sequential read speed of 458MB/s. In use, this means the Pi is not slowed down by disk access in any noticeable way. When using the 512GB drive as a boot device with a standard Raspbian installation, 503GB (469GiB) is allocated to the filesystem, and ~10GB of this is used by the OS + default applications in the standard installation without "recommended" software.”
“The SSD arrived in an amazing fast time and since I had already purchased the SSD Board on a previous occasion from Pi Hut, I had this installed in less than a minute. I am a very a very ahhpy customer with a blistering fast Raspbery pi 8GB box. Thanks”
“Excellent product, good price and even Pi branded. Just what I needed for my pi5 compute module development kit bought at the same time as this drive. Arrived promptly.”
