Adding NVMe Storage to your Raspberry Pi 5 - No more SD cards!!! 

I'm using an Nvme hat instead from Geekworm and I have ordered a case for it that should be able to fit everything (hat included plus the Nvme heatsink). That case is out-of-stock now. 😅

The disadvantage is that you have to buy a hat to have the capability. I just canceled my RP5 order and getting an Orange Pi Plus, which is what I was going to get before I got sucked into the RP5 hype. RP5 also has no built in NPU so I can have a Coral TPU or I can have NVMe. Seems they are a day late and a dollar short. I have a problem with a company that cannot meet the demand for their products and the couple of stock updates I got suggested I would have to wait until May to get an RP5. I ordered the last week of November. It is already not looking very attractive on the basis of features. Basically will serve as a console emulator for most people and a less than stellar one at that. You can get a 16GB Orange Pi Plus for around $170 including case and power supply. It has two 2.5GB Ethernet ports, an onboard, full length M.2 slot that doesn't stick awkwardly out the side of the board. It also has a Wi-Fi card slot. It also has double the core count. I would have spent that much on the RP5 by the time I got all the extras to do what the Orange Pi can do out of the box. It will also run drives a lot faster than an RP5. Double the bandwidth. An IPO is about the only thing that will get their lazy butts moving to meet demand. Still, nobody seems to want readily available, cheap Pis.

I hope your orange Pi works and does everything you want it to.@@Lurch-Bot

@@Lurch-Bot I get you. I ordered mine around November too and got it 1st week of January. With all the upgrades, it all came down to $300+ (the 2TB Nvme SSD is $100+). I looked up Orange Pi Plus and like you mentioned, the specs sounds awesome! Two things that I would worry about though are software availability and support for it. On that, it can't match a Raspberry Pi. Despite enjoying my Pi 5 a lot atm, I do feel some regret getting it--mostly because I spent more than I would want to with all the upgrades. For the same amount, I feel I should have gotten a decent mini-PC instead. In fact, I did get a mini-PC recently. A Beelink SER 5 with 16GB RAM and 500GB Nvme SSD storage using a Ryzen 5700u. This mini-PC runs circles on my Pi 5. With a USB 3.2 to 2.5GbE adapter, I was able to get 2.5Gb speeds on it. I also used a DP 1.4 to HDMI 2.1 adapter and now it can do 4K @ 120fps. With a little tweaking in the BIOS power settings, the CPU now draws 2.3-2.6w on idle and about 10w when playing 4k videos and doing office tasks. The max power draw I get is about 21w when stressing the CPU+iGPU with benchmarks. I don't see this at all with just regular use. So yea, I'll just go for a mini-PC on my next one. They are more powerful, easier to upgrade, and can be configured to draw less power depending on which CPU you choose. I'm using my Pi 5 as a server atm running Debian headless install and CasaOS as a docker dashboard manager. I'm liking the performance a lot especially with the fast pcie Nvme SSD I put on it. Software support and tutorials online are plentiful for it too so that made my life easier when troubleshooting stuff. But will I get another Raspberry Pi again in the future? Maybe not if the price just keep increasing and the availability is scarce. Most likely I'll just go for another lower power efficient mini-PC. Anyway good luck on that Orange Pi Plus! I hope it works out for you! 👍

Unlike the Argon v3 too :(

🤣

Looks like recent pics from Gaza

I did. I used -j4.

@@GaryExplains Yeah, probably just can't saturate it this way.

Exactly.

You mean the cost of the base unit or the cost of adding different bits like NVMe?

Raspberry Pi is really an ala carte system. If you’re running a headless os - You can power the pi off of a tablet charger without active cooling. If you need a desktop replacement… things are different

Depends what you want to use it for. A Pi has GPIO bins, which a Chromebook doesn't have. A Chromebook is portable, which a Pi isn't. And so on.

@@GaryExplains , I'm finding desktop apps less and less necessary these days. A student may need portability but a retiree just need something that has the chrome browser and doesn't become obsolete in a few years. i.e. can one actually get away with living with a thin client? Thanks.

There is a list of tested drive on the Pimoroni website, the Kingston KC3000 is on the approved list. The KC3000 is "PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2". Check the web page for more information on compatibility.

@@GaryExplains Thanks Gary, will do.

No. I am not 100% sure how that it resolved, but either the Pi Imager program handles that or it is done on the first boot. Either way, you get the full disk size.

@@GaryExplains It's done on first boot by the installed OS; while rpi-imager does have some post-flash customization steps for those images that request it (SSH keys, initial user passwords, wifi passwords, etc.) it doesn't handle partition/fs resizing. I'd guess this is probably because there's so much variation in all the images, it would require that rpi-imager bundle all the tooling necessary for all the fs' in use (ext4, btrfs, etc.); whereas the installed OS must necessarily have the tooling available for its own rootfs, and almost every fs commonly in use these days permits online resizing, so it's easier to just "let the installed OS deal with that".

I couldn’t get raspberry pi OS to see more than 2tb, even when manually expanding storage in config. I have a 4tb drive I was trying to use.

@@CyberDunk2077 This is likely because RaspiOS is using the older MBR partitioning scheme in their images (which has a limit of 2TB for partition sizes). The Raspberry Pi bootloader *can* understand the newer GPT partitioning scheme (which would permit larger sizes) but only on more modern boards IIRC, which is probably why they're sticking with MBR for now. However, if you're happy tinkering with partitioning schemes (convert the drive to GPT, expand the root partition, then the rootfs) it should be possible to achieve this.

@@DaveJones-Waveform Cheers

I know this is late, but yes I would use a usb drive for media, because that's what is gonna be read and written to alot more than just running an os and some apps, which too much reading and writing to an sd card will make it die much quicker, and the usb drive should be quicker than an sd card. What I would suggest is once you got everything setup, make an image of the sd card (aka a backup) and that way if your sd card ever dies or gets corrupted, you can flash that image to a new sd card and everything will be setup already and your media files will be safe on your usb drive and not lost. Oh and it's fine to have a usb drive plugged in constantly. Hope this helps!

There was no "second" tar. To move from the SD card test to the NVMe test requires a reboot from a different disk.

Benchmarks suggest 3 to 4 times faster than my Samsung T5 through USB 3.

No, I didn't have any problems. Check with geeekpi to see if your SSD has been tested with its board. I know for my board there is a list of "don't use" SSDs.

@@GaryExplains yeah, been checking in-between meetings today. Aaaah, dammit! I think lspci just revealed my problem. It’s got a Phison controller. I know those are supposed to be not the best after watching a couple videos. I’ll just keep it for now as a non-boot disk controller and get a better one in a month.

If you are referring to Samsung's announcement then I covered SD express back in 2018 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-_yEJYMTCipE.html

There is a section on the Pimoroni website about drive compatibility.

Yeah, like you, I have never had an SD card failure, but I haven't used the cards with many intensive IO operations. For my NAS setup I use a Pi and an external hard drive, so most of the IO is on the hard drive.

I've experienced a lot of SD card failure back when i depended on it to expand phone storage - ended up with lots of corrupted mp3s, unreadable photos, and files whose checksum wouldn't match against other copies! A decade might have passed since then, but i still wouldn't trust it 😅

(And yes this happened to me with multiple cards and in multiple devices, not just one faulty unit)

Care to make a video about your HD pi NAS? ​@@GaryExplains

I did! Two in fact! Try ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-O-FfOWdZAQ4.html and ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-8fIeiZx4voU.html

Can you run the firmware updater from another source?

Unfortunately the Pi 5 is not powerful enough for modern Bitcoin mining. Today you need specialist hardware for that or a PC with a very big (and expensive ) GPU.

Does the GMKtec have GPIO?

There is a list on Pimorani's website. That list is authoritative.

How the heck did you kill those sd cards? 😂 wear and tear I assume?

Are you are saying that USB is the same as NVMe? 🤔

@@GaryExplains No, speed diff is pretty good, but, would it have killed them to not make NVMe or SATA hat dependent? Put an M.2 NVMe or SATA on the back side like several other SBCs did when they saw the advantage? The ribbon is 'mice' for other PCIe uses (which can take advantage of a hat...

Yes, many people share that sentiment. I have a video here on this channel about using a second hand PC as an alternative to a Pi. Of course, the older models are still available at lower prices. To be fair to the Pi, i don't think it was ever intended to be a home server. Having said that I use a Pi 3 as a NAS server. It has been running for a couple of years without incident.

Which version of USB 3.2 do you think you need? Isn't the Pi 5's 5Gbps USB speed not enough for 2.5GbE?

@@GaryExplains The USB3 to 2.5GbE adapter I got from Amazon specifically states it requires USB 3.2 Type A or Type C (Thunderbolt 3/4) to work. The Pi 5 only uses USB 3.0 unfortunately. This 2.5GbE adapter I got works great on my mini-PC that didn't come with a 2.5GbE connection. I also used a Displayport 1.4 to HDMI 2.1 display adapter on it so now I can do 4k @120Hz via HDMI. 😁

One thing to remember is that USB 3.0 and USB 3.2 gen 1x1 are the same thing. Have you seen my video on USB naming? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-FnCoALB1dcU.htmlfeature=shared

@@GaryExplains The USB to 2.5GbE network adapter I got doesn't work well with the Pi 5 unfortunately. Someone did comment it wasn't the adapter but a software issue on the Pi 5. I'll try to test this again in the future.