NVMe Base Duo for RPi 5

NVMe Base Duo for Raspberry Pi 5

Add two ultra-fast NVMe SSDs to your Raspberry Pi 5! This HAT is ideal if you need redundancy or simply more storage capacity for your Raspberry Pi 5.

NVMe Base Duo is a PCIe Gen 2 expansion board for Raspberry Pi 5. To use it, simply install one or two M-key NVMe SSDs (2230 to 2280 sizes are supported) and mount it under (or above) your Raspberry Pi for a compact and fast storage solution.

This PCIe expansion board is the perfect solution to turn your Pi 5 into a file server, home automation server with integrated backup, media center, reverse proxy, and more. In short, it can be used in any project that benefits from large amounts of fast storage, redundancy, or spare drives, especially workloads with high IOPS (input/output operations per second). In short, it’s a truly revolutionary board!

NVMe Base Duo follows Raspberry Pi Foundation’s new “PIP” design guidelines, ensuring ease of use and long-term support through Raspberry Pi OS updates. Although still early in development, things are improving rapidly.

Important notice: It is not possible to boot from NVMe drives installed on NVMe Base Duo. Future firmware updates for Raspberry Pi 5 may add support, but currently the system can only boot from the SD card or other root devices on the PCIe bus. You’ll need to boot it from the SD card, and once the system has loaded, you can configure some system folders onto the SSD by physically moving them to the SSD and setting up disk redirection (for example, the Applications folder), so that the contents of those folders run on two very fast SSDs. Guides are available, but this is a fairly technical setup. If you are not comfortable with this, we recommend starting with the single “NVMe Base”, which supports NVMe booting.

NVMe Base Duo KIT for Raspberry Pi 5 includes:

• NVMe Base Duo PCB with two M.2 (M-Key) slots
• ‘PCIe Flex’ ribbon cable
• 4 rubber feet
• 4x M2 bolts and 2x 5mm spacers for SSD mounting
• 4x M2.5 12mm spacers for base mounting
• 8x short M2.5 screws for base mounting
• 4x long 20mm M2.5 screws for pass-through mounting with a HAT

The product shipped may have slight differences from the images shown on this page. Do not worry—the product remains essentially the same, with only minor manufacturing variations.

It is recommended to run Raspberry Pi 5 at PCIe Gen 2 x1 speed with this base. Total throughput is approximately 450MB/s, or over 220MB/s per drive under simultaneous access, as bandwidth is shared through the PCIe switch.

Suggested drive compatibility
Pimoroni has successfully tested NVMe Base with the following M.2 NVMe SSDs. Pimoroni would like to point out that this is a good guide for which drives to use, but the tests were carried out on sample units, so results may vary due to the usual changes manufacturers make between different revisions of the drives.

– ADATA SX8200PNP
– ADATA LEGEND 700
– Crucial CT500P5PSSD8
– Gigabyte GP-GSM2NE3256GNTD
– Kingston SKC3000S512G
– KIOXIA EXCERIA SSD
– KIOXIA EXCERIA G2 SSD
– Lexar SSD NM710
– Netac NV200-512-E4X
– ORIGIN Inception TLC830 Pro
– Patriot P300
– Patriot P310
– Patriot P300
– PNY CS1030
– Sabrent Rocket Nano
– Sabrent SB-RKT4P-1TB
– Sabrent Rocket 4.0
– Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus
– Samsung SSD 980
– Samsung SSD 980 PRO
– SK hynix GOLD P31
– TeamGroup TM8FP6256G
– Toshiba KBG40ZNS1T02
– Transcend TS500GMTE110Q
– WD Blue SN550
– WD Black SN750 SE
– WD PC SN740
– WD Red SN700
– WD Black SN770
– WD Blue SN570
– WD Green SN350

“Avoid” list
Some issues were found during testing or reported.
– Ortial ON-750-128

Otherwise, most M.2 NVMe SSD drives (not SATA!) that you have available should work correctly.

Getting started
To ensure a smooth setup, make sure your Raspberry Pi OS is up to date and your Pi 5 firmware is updated to 2023-12-06 (December 6th 2023) or newer. This ensures full support for Raspberry Pi PCIe features without requiring configuration changes.

Raspberry Pi OS updates usually handle this automatically, but you can force it by:
– Open a terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T)
– Run sudo raspi-config and select ‘Latest’ under Advanced Options > Bootloader Version
– Run sudo rpi-eeprom-update on the terminal to check the current firmware version

Notes:

• Always power off your Raspberry Pi and disconnect power before installing or removing NVMe Base Duo.
• At the moment, booting from NVMe drives on NVMe Base Duo is not supported. If this feature is important to you, consider the single NVMe Base (which supports NVMe boot) instead
• NVMe Base Duo provides two M.2 PCIe Gen 2 slots behind a Gen 2 PCIe packet switch on a PCIe x1 connection intended for SSD use only. We cannot guarantee functionality with non-SSD devices.

Pimoroni name: NVMe Base Duo for Raspberry Pi 5 – NVMe Base Duo [PIM704]