“Purchased a RPi5, SSD kit, cooler KKSB case, keyboard and PSU. Assembly into case was slightly tricky as access to the ribbon cable for the SSD is limited. Having fitted the cooler, I found that I needed to use both the GPIO header extender from the SSD kit and the one supplied with the case in order to get the pins through the HAT and allow for any further additional hardware. I also used the longer pillar bolt spacers supplied with the case. Perhaps some clearer installation guidance on this might be helpful for others.
I downloaded a copy of the RPi OS onto an SD card using the imager running on a Windows laptop. I put it into my newly built RPi5 and it booted up fine. I then ran the updates. I used the RPiOS SD copy utility to image the SSD rather than use the imager followed by updates. Following the instructions, I then ran sudo raspi-config to set the boot order to boot from the SSD. At this point it asked to update the firmware. I was slightly surprised that a new RPi5 needed this, but anyway it sort itself out and all was well. Shut down the RPi5, remove the SD card, then re-start.
End result is a Raspberry Pi that is substantially faster than my RPi400 (which I have booting from a USB SSD) and boot time is halved to 15 seconds.
I now have an ideal general purpose computer that takes up very little space, and without all the endless requests to wait, to back up, to link etc etc that plague Windows users. It's just what I want!”
“First time I've bought the SSD HAT for a Pi. Really nice to get away from using a microSD card. Much better performance and plenty of storage capacity. Only thing to note is that this board mounts on top of the GPIO pins and covers the Pis CPU, which means you can't have an active cooling fan as well.”
“Better for people who aren't as 'fat fingered as me'. I pulled out the plastic part that holds the cable in, but was able to get it back it. It is very easy to install the OS on the SSD from the standard RPi installer when booting from the mico-SSD card. Working well!”
