Adding an NVMe Drive to a Raspberry Pi 5 | Pimoroni NVMe Base | Qubits Tech

in this video I'll be taking a look at the Raspberry Pi 5 nvme base from pitmon this is one of a few boards that have cropped up that allow you to use an nvme drive with your Raspberry Pi 5 I'll be taking a look at the base seeing how it fits to a Raspberry Pi and doing some basic testing with an nvme Drive installed the first thing you'll notice is the really nice design that they've got on the packaging Pimon do always have great packaging for their products which always gives a good first impression if you haven't used them before Pimon sell a wide range of makup products including boards that they make themselves this is not a sponsored video but they're a great company to deal with so be sure to check them out so with that said let's get this bag open and take a look at the board so there's a few separate parts inside the bag so let's be careful here make sure we don't lose any of these smaller pieces so of course first of all we've got the base itself it's a really nice looking board not a huge amount going on there but it doesn't really need it we've got the PCI Express slot on the left the base has multiple mounting points which allows for different size ssds to be used there's also an unpopulated footprint up here and it looks like it's something power related but I'm not entire sure what this could be used for on the back of the board we got a nice silk screen design with additional labels for each of the SSD mounting points otherwise this side of the board is totally empty we've also got a bag full of screws and standoffs which will contain everything we need to get this set up and attached to a pie we have four rubber feet which can be used if you want to sit the pie on a flat surface and these would be attached to the bottom of the mvme base and last but not least we have this nice little cable which will plug in later on to make the connection between the base and the P the ends are labeled so it should be easy to get this the right way around and install it correctly and this is where I'm going to start the assembly lift up the flap of the connector it should be really easy to slot the cable in place just make sure it's the right way around the printing on the cable should be facing downward once the cable's fully inserted close the tab to lock it in place with the cable fitted I'm now going to go ahead and install the SSD here's the drive that I'm going to be using with the Raspberry p while the connector on this drive is the same as you'll find on Sat m.2 drives the label does confirm that this drive is nvme it's 128 GB which is more than enough for my usage and it comes in the 2242 form factor so it is a bit shorter than the full length nvme drive when choosing an SSD to use with the pi bear in mind that it's only certified for PCI Express Gen 2 though it is possible to enable gen 3 support by tweaking the poty config before installing the SSD I wanted to point out that it is possible to flash an OS directly onto it though this requires an upto-date P that's configured for mvme booting I won't be doing that now as I'll be installing the OS directly from the pi but it's something to bear in mind if you want to install another OS at a later date there are three different lengths of screw that come with this kit to mount the SSD you want to use the medium length screw so the middle one outs of the three slot this through the relevant hole on the underside of the nvme base and then you'll want to use a nut to hold that screw in place once that's done the SSD can be installed with another nut used to secure the SSD against the screw that we've just fitted the next thing I'm going to fit now are the mounting posts which will hold the Raspberry Pi above the base for this you want to use the shortest screws and fit them to the mounting holes around the outside of the base before go any further I just wanted to point out that the next steps that I do here are in a different order to the official Pimon installation video while I chose to mount the pie next and install the cable afterwards the Pimon video guide plugs the cable into the pie and then folds the pie on top of the base I don't see any issues with the way that I install the drive but I wanted to point this out in case you wanted to follow Pimon his install guide next I'm going to put the Raspberry Pi 5 on top of this and I'm just going to screw this in place again using the short screws that are available to ensure everything lines up correctly I'm just going to partially tighten these screws for now and once they're all fitted I can then tighten it up fully the screws are fitted and tightened fully so the last thing for me to do now is to plug in this cable before trying to plug the cable in you need to make sure that the clip on the connector is raised and that will allow the cable to slot into place and then once it's in you simply push down on the clip and that will hold the cable tightly in place so that it doesn't come out I don't want to create any bends or folds while doing this so I'm going to be quite careful and try and bend it over as smoothly as I can just to make sure that the cable doesn't become damaged so we can see that's clipped down that's nice and secure and the cable doesn't stick out too much from the pie but it has also got a nice curve it's not pulled tightly and there are no creases in the cable one thing to not is that the cable does slightly block the micro SD card slot so take extra care when inserting or removing a Micro SD card that's the hardware done so now let's take a look at the software side this is a fresh copy of Raspberry Pi OS which is flashed onto a Micro SD card the first thing to do is to make sure that the Pi's boot loader is up to date to do this I'm going to open a terminal and type raspy config separated with a h this will start the rasby pr software configuration tool under Advanced options select bootloader version and select the option to use the latest version of the boot ROM software once this is done reboot the P to make sure that the update is successful once rebooted reopen the raspy config tool and set the P to default to the nvme drive again under Advanced options this time we'll go to the boot order setting and select the nvma SL USB boot option this isn't strictly necessary later on when we remove the micro SD card it will automatically boot to an mvme Drive anyway but this will make it easier to test that the mvme drive is bootable without having to unplug the micro SD card that's everything done on the config side so I'll now close raspy config and move on to installing an OS on the drive to do this I'm going to be using the raspberry pi Imaging tool that you don't need to use this you can use any method that you normally use to flash an OS onto a drive first is to select the device so obviously that's a Raspberry Pi 5 then to select the operating system we'll go with the 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS and then we have to select the drive that we want to install it to and as we can see here the 128 gig SSD is the drive that's showing so now we can click next and now we've got a little dialogue which allows us to customize some settings but I'm just going to skip this and set the up once it's booted now we have to accept to wipe the drive and it's also now asking for our password just to make sure that we have permission to actually do that so now all there is to do is wait for the image to be downloaded and installed by the Imaging tool and then we should be able to boot directly from the SSD so we've skipped ahead a few minutes now it took about 3 or 4 minutes to install and now we're ready to reboot the system I'm actually going to shut down the pie that's just so that I can remove the micro SD card while it's powered off so we can be sure that it's definitely booting from the SSD so now that's removed I'll power it back on and hopefully will get a successful boot we've now booted into the initial setup for Raspberry Pi OS so that shows that the OS was installed correctly I'll go through and complete this setup and then I'll run a couple of basic benchmarks on the drive to see what kind of performance we're getting I'll be using a all called HD Palm to do the test on the drive this does need to be installed in Raspberry Pi OS as it's not included out of the box but I've already gone ahead and done that so here we have the results from a stock conf configuration of running HD Palm this is using the default Raspberry Pi config and I will compare this later on to enabling PCI Express gen 3 to see if that makes any difference to the speed the timing cach reads will be expected to be roughly the same kind of result in both tests so it's been included as a bit of a control value as this is reading cache data and not pulling data directly from the drive the buffer disc reads is the one we're more interested in and this gave a result of 433 mb per second next I'll enable G 3 PCI Express by adding a line to the P config.txt I'll leave the added line on screen for a few seconds just in case you're looking to type this in yourself with this setting changed I now reboot the p and I'm going to repeat this HD Palm test and see what result we get so here are the results of the repeated test with PCI Express gen 3 enabled and we can see as expected the timing cache reads pretty much the same as what they were before but the buffer disc reads this is actually pulling data from the drive so this is the real test of the drive's performance he now coming in at over 800 mbes a second or almost double the previous result it's worth remembering that rasby Pi 5 isn't certified for Gen 3 PCI Express performance but on the basis of what I've seen here if you really want to squeeze maximum performance out of your drive it's certainly worth enabling this option so that's it for the performance test and I think we can safely conclude that using an MV drive with this base delivers much greater performance than using a Micro SD card so that was a look at the Pimon nvme base for the Raspberry Pi 5 it's a fairly cheap board it was easy to put together and most importantly performance of an mvme Drive is far greater than that of a micro SD card certainly if you have tasks that have a lot of read and wrs from a drive you'll definitely benefit from The increased performance I hope you like this video thank you very much for watching and be sure to stick around for the next one

Channel: Qubits Tech

Views: 5,433

Keywords: Raspberry Pi 5, SSD

Id: pVxm2o0V5VU

Length: 14min 10sec (850 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 17 2024