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

hey there my name is Gary Sims and this is Gary explains now one of the potential Promises of the Raspberry Pi 5 was that it could be used with nvme uh Solid State Storage an SSD with an mtype 2 one now that wasn't initially available when the pi 5 came out it's possible because the pi5 has access to a PCI connector and in fact the official uh solutions from Raspberry Pi are still not available however there are some third party ones in particular today we're going to be looking at nvme base by Pimon now it allows you to connect an M2 nvme drive to your pi5 in fact you can boot off it so goodbye SD cards now it took me quite a while to get hold of one but I finally got hold of one so this video is kind of a review and a look at the advantages of using nvme drives with a Raspberry Pi 5 so if you want to find out more please let me explain now obviously SD cards have many many many advantages including the fact that they're relatively cheap they're easily to get hold of you don't have to buy huge terabyte you know you can buy like a 32 gigabyte one like that and of course it's a flexibility so you can try one OS on your Raspberry Pi or a particular project then you can swap out the cards and try another one and so on however they do have some disadvantages speed is one of them although the rby pi 5 does have a much greater speed uh 10 mbes a second uh compared to the previous generations and also some people are worried about their long-term reliability Now when using an nvme Drive of course we can uh use a proper solid state hard drive what we might use in a PC or a desktop you got great improvements in speed hopefully improvements in reliability and certainly improvements in sort of storage capacity so with the mvme base from poni you can connect an M2 uh solid state drive to your Raspberry Pi so we look at three separate things in this video the actual physical Hardware then how you get Rasberry Pi OS on that hardware and any other software setup that you need to do and then finally does it improve the performance is it worth it okay so let's start by looking at the hardware so the en base is a card that goes on the bottom of the raspberry piie and we're often familiar with hats that go on top of the raspberry piie this one in fact goes on the bottom and it uses a small ribbon cable to connect from the uh base plate to the Ros Pi 5 the PCI connector so it's a ribbon cable for the PCI now assembling it is fairly simple you have to put on the kind of little spaces in each of the four holes that are provided they give you a bag of screws so you just pick out the right screws and they are a bit sometimes they are a bit similar you trying to work out which one's which but if you pay attention you can work out what they do so you put in the spacers okay then you need to connect in the uh nvme drive and the way you fix that is the best way I found and I think of course to the official video you stick a screw upwards from the bottom you put a nut on it you then put the drive down then you put a second nut on it once you've done that you've got the drive connected and then now the most tricky part is actually connecting the pcie canable it does have good arrows on it uh so you know which end goes to which end you have to pull back those connectors you know the ribbon cable connectors be very careful I've broken way too many of those in my lifetime so be really really careful not on this particular Ball but in general I find those ribbon cable connect to all I always seem to be too you know let's pull that and it all goes flying so be really careful with that okay you put in one end probably start with the Raz with pen that's what I did and then kind of orientate yourself you want to flip over in the end so make sure that you get that uh set up right you can unflip it connect in the other one and then flip it together and then once you have it nicely put together you can then screw in the other screws to make sure it's all secure and from the hardware point of view that's it now in terms of software the easiest easiest way I'm think there are a couple of other ways to do this but the easiest way to do this is basically just to boot up uh Raspberry Pi OS using an SD card on that Raspberry Pi 5 so prepare that as a way you do before I've got lots of videos about that here on this channel so you probably want to use the raspberry pie imager on a PC create an SD card and then boot up on that then what you want to do is install the Rasberry pie imager on the Raspberry Pi 5 and then you want to say to it will actually write the OS to the mvme drive will then appear in the list of devices that are available and then you just need to wait it will download and write it to it somewhere along the way you'll also want to make sure that you've got the latest boot loader firmware installed and there is a command you can run that will double check that for you so it's called rpi-eeprom-update if you run that with the minus a flag then it will automatically download and install the latest uh boot loader for you after you do that you are going to need to go in and change the boot order in the Raspberry Pi config program it's under the advanced menu there and you can make sure it does boot off the mvme drive if it doesn't uh if it can't find an NSD card now there's also another couple other things that you'll want to do once you boot it up with your new mvme drive you can enable faster PCI uh gen 3 there's a hack around to do that you need to edit the /boot SLC config.txt file and add this DT param line and in the all section at the bottom uh and there are full instructions on how to do this you need to cut and paste that actually on the P website now the pci3 isn't officially supported however it does seem to work uh very well so I've got that enabled on mine and that's absolutely great and that's it you should now be up and running without an SD card but with an mvme drive so the question is is it worth it does it give you anything besides that you know possibility of big store storage and of course that reliability Factor well it depends on what you're going to do for example so if you try to boot from an SD card a highspeed one at the maximum rating for the pi five it goes from just pressing the reset button to the desk it takes about 19 seconds now if you do that from nvme it takes about 15 seconds so what about launching an application so if you run something like Firefox then if you launch that on an SD card in about 5 Seconds now if you launch it from the nvme it takes 4 seconds so yes it is faster yes you can see the difference but are you going to notice it well in that case probably not I thought compiling might be improved so if I you run a project like htop okay compile that from source is about 40,000 lines of code uh actually it's exactly 6.3 seconds on both systems so that shows the compiling there is probably more CPU and memory uh kind of bottleneck rather than actual IO bottleneck cuz it didn't make any difference but I then tried an actual dis intensive task if you want to create a tar file with of you know about 3 and a half gigabytes I tied up the SL USR the SL user directory and it took around 3 minutes and 15 seconds on the SD card but when you do it on the nvme drive it takes 13 seconds Yes you heard that right 13 seconds so you can see the huge difference when it's a very very intensive IO uh kind of operation in this case just do this create this T file from these files it's reading and writing because it's reading what you your you're archiving and then writing it at the same time Envy me one you know more than 10 times faster more than 10 times uh faster so there you go so if you're doing lots of IO intensive operations then certainly you're going to need an mvme drive if you wanted to for example do network attached storage and this would be a great way to do network attached storage uh maybe have have an external hard drive a traditional hard drive if for kind of keeping a backup of what you've got on the mvme drive or use another pi5 and copy over the network whatever but that's going to be much quicker than using you know an SD card so there you go am I keeping it like that yes I am that's all connected up now that's absolutely great my Pi five is going to run in that configuration very very happy with it if you're not using your pii for that kind of thing you're not using as a desktop you're not using it for Io intensive operation you're just using for projects for robotics for sensors for gpio for learning a bit of python whatever you going to do like that then you might not necessarily have to invest in one of these a nice it's a nice thing it's a it's a good thing but it's not Essential by any means okay that's it my name is Gary Sims this is Gary I hope you enjoyed this video you got any questions about the mvme base do let me know in the comments and I'll try as best as I can to answer I'm not affiliated with Pimon anyway whatsoever so I'll just can answer it if I can from my own experience okay if you like this kind of videos please do consider subscribing to the channel I suppose that's it I'll see you in the next [Music] [Applause] [Music] one

Channel: Gary Explains

Views: 30,391

Keywords: Gary Explains, Tech, Explanation, Tutorial, NVMe, Raspberry Pi 5, SSD, PCIe, NVME Base, Pimorani, M.2., Fast Storage

Id: w4X55XuxvTE

Length: 9min 25sec (565 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 24 2024