I Found the Best NVMe Hat for the Raspberry Pi 5

this Raspberry Pi 5 is booting from a super fast Samsung 1 tbte nvme and it's overclocked to PCI gen 3 speeds which should accelerate just about every function on the device and to really put it through its Paces I set up frigate's home surveillance NVR featuring a coral USB Edge TPU and a generic webcam and what's interesting is this whole setup is still only pulling about 8 or 9 Watts which is really power efficient and so I'm going to put the camera right in here and then go over to my terminal here to show you what it's doing so that webcam is feeding a live FFM Peg stream into an rtsp server which is on the Raspberry Pi and we also are hosting frigate on the Raspberry Pi so if I go into the shot like this then it should start recording automatically because we have person detection enabled and there it is so at only 8 W this is quite the Workhorse and nvme just makes everything faster and just for a frame of reference this LED light right here which is supposed to be energy efficient if I turn it on it will start pulling over 30 WTS so that just gives you a sense of how energy efficient the Raspberry Pi is Raspberry Pi has always had a thing for SD cards dating all the way back to the Raspberry Pi 1 but the problem is there's slow have limited storage capacity and lack reliability even this top-of-the-line SanDisk Extreme running on the Raspberry Pi 5's upgraded SDR 104 slot can only read about 80 mbes per second and the slot itself caps out at 104 mb per second so naturally rpai users have been eagerly awaiting better Alternatives and the transporter himself has finally answered our prayers by bringing nvmes to the Raspberry Pi 5 so I conducted a comprehensive performance analysis to find the absolute best setup out there by buying one of the fastest M2 nvmes and running it on the most popular hats out there I'll cover how to set them up overclocking the PCI gen 3 speeds Benchmark boot times read WR times general purpose performance using geekbench as well as power efficiency I also compared the rpy 5 to its predecessors and uncovered a few enhancements that are definitely worth noting I'll even throw the nvme on an x86 board and compare the speeds before we dive deeper I've got to give a huge shout out to the sponsor of this video jlc PCB now let me share a little secret with you my fascination with tiny Tech and microcontrollers is growing by the day it's incredibly exciting to see this domain evolve to a point where hobbyists like myself can transform a spark of imagination into a tangible production quality product without breaking the bank jlcpcb is at the Forefront of this revolution empowering millions of creators and innovators around the globe to bring even their most ambitious projects to life for anyone ready to start their journey into Electronics manufacturing jlcpcb is offering exclusive $60 discount for all new customers just click the promo code Link in the description below to get started let's unleash our creativity together and make something amazing with jlc PCB so let's start with the p Moroni Bas this piece of Hardware hails from the UK and there's a couple key things that I like about it one is that the hat does not cover the SD card it has a curve FPC cable that allows you to access the SD card it also protects the nvme by nestling it between the pie and the base itself it also comes with solid rubber feet so that it's stabilized when placed on a solid surface ultimately what we're looking for is a sandwich like this start by adding the nvme key to this is to come in at a 30° Angle now what we want to do is add one of these spacers here we want the thick to be on the bottom just so it's elevated a little bit and then we're going to grab one of these screws it's elevated it looks good and I already added uh two standoffs here I'm not going to add all four because we're going to be taking it off uh pretty quickly but two should do the trick for testing purposes it tells you Raspberry Pi here PCI here so now we're going to take this we're going to go like this okay we're going to grab some like this can do it like one it's it's stable it's not going anywhere and again I can still get up that micro SD card so I personally like that okay and with the Raspberry Pi turned on we should be able to connect and we should be able to see if the drive has been picked up so we're going to do LS Blk and we can see the nvme right there at 1 tbte so that looks pretty good let's go ahead and update the config so we're going to do rasp hyphen config we're going to go to update we're going to go to Advanced options we're going to go to Bootloader version and we're going to select latest use the latest version boot ROM software we're also going to go back to Advanced options and we're going to go to boot order and we're going to select okay and then we're going to go ahead and reboot we're going to log back in in okay we're going to do raspy config we're going to update we're also going to do app get upgrade okay and then we're going to do raspy config and we're going to go to Advanced options go to boot order and now we're going to select nvme um if available right okay and then one more thing is interface options let's enable VNC cuz we're going to want to use that in a second and let's go ahead and reboot so now the only problem is uh we don't have the operating system on the nbme so I'm going to go over to VNC and I'm going to connect to raspberry pi. local and we're going to go to accessories then we're going to go to SD card Card Copier we're going to select our micro SD card and then we're going to select for the two device the uh Samsung 970 nvme okay so let's go ahead and click Start it's going to erase all the content on the nvme we're going to select yes okay so we just wrote the operating system to the nvme and again guys if you get lost a stepbystep tutorial will be in the description below so what we're going to do do now is turn off the Raspberry Pi remove the micro SD card and see if it boots from the NVM okay so out goes the SSD put that down here and then let go ahead and boot this guy up so it looks like we're in our Raspberry Pi we have uh no SD card only have the n vme and we are running from the 1 terb nvme so this looks good so what we're going to want to do now is run some benchmarks so we can compare the other nvme and the SSD so one thing I want to do right away is enable pcie gen 3 so to do that I'm going to edit boot firmware config.txt and at the very end of this file we're going to add this entry here dtp Pam PCI X1 gen 3 and then I think we need to reboot so I'm going to do reboot now okay so we can see here that pcie Gen 3 is enabled because we see 8 GT per second so that looks good to me so let's run a couple tests here and we can run this command here against the nvme okay and we got 806 mb/ second second but I also want to see the boot time so we're going to run this system dyen analyze command and we can see that it booted in 10 seconds and basically what we're going to see is for whatever reason nvme doesn't materially improve boot times unfortunately you're still going to get a little over 10 seconds in most cases okay and then there's this website here called Pi benchmarks and go ahead and execute this okay so we got 44,4 50 okay so I also want to run geekbench so I'm going to download this uh program called Pi apps that should help facilitate that and then we will use VNC for the rest so if we go to accessories Pi apps should give us geek bench I Think Geek bench 6 probably now we should be able to go over here and do okay so we got a 784 for the single core and a 1640 for the multicore and down here you can kind of see it broken out by the different tasks that were executed okay so now we're going to look at the Pineberry hat Drive bottom this company is based out of Norway and they offer a number of custom hats one for the coral AI Edge TPU and a couple M2 hats that go on top and underneath the Raspberry Pi they also have this sort of uh minimalist um housing for uh some of these hat drives here which you could pick up this is exposed right here so I put these standoffs to kind of elevate it you could put all four standoffs and they'll stand up properly but that's enough to kind of keep it off the ground there um so okay no micro D we have the nvme let's go ahead and boot her up all right LSB okay so we see the nvme no micro SD that looks good okay so I'll spare you from having to watch me go through all the benchmarks again but basically what I did is I ran through that same series of benchmarks for read times write times boot times geekbench 6 and Raspberry Pi bench marks and I did that same series of tests for the pine hat the Pineberry hat a standard micro SD on the Raspberry Pi 5 a standard micro SD on the Raspberry Pi 4 as well as the zimma blade which is an x86 board with the nvme okay so let's talk about the overall results of these tests let's start with the boot time so interestingly the nvme doesn't drastically reduce the boot boot times it seems like no matter what you're going to get about 10sec boot times now one thing I will note is the Raspberry Pi 4 was benchmarked at around 25 seconds so jumping from the four to the 5 does cut that boot time in half but from there it really doesn't matter if you use micro SD or alternative storage options okay General read speeds so a couple things the Raspberry Pi 4 was using an older version of the micro SD slot and it was capping out at around 45 mb per second now just upgrading to the Raspberry Pi 5 you get a new micro SD slot protocol that doubles that read time to about 85 mbytes per second but it's still kind of slow and you'll notice uh those types of slow read times as you kind of uh utilize tools that do a lot of disc operations so getting the nvme in there is going to show huge gains and you're going to jump from that 85 megabytes all the way to about 800 MB so it's a factor of 10 increase in speeds but what was really interesting is the zimma blade which again it's a different setup it's a x86 architecture but it has a pcie uh Port that supports Gen 2 speeds now Gen 2 speeds theoretically cap out at 500 mbes a second but it gave you access to four lanes of it which equates to 2 gb per second and when I ran that HD parm read test I was able to pull about 12200 megabytes per second so ultimately you know the Raspberry Pi 5 it has that single Lane and you can get about 800 meaby megabytes down but uh it's going to be limited and some of these other sbcs open up more lanes and even if the lanes are slower they Compound on each other so if you have four lanes at a slower speed you're still getting faster speeds at the end of the day so it's something to think about and this also shows up in the pi Benchmark scripts now this is a more involveed script it uses several different libraries in order to evaluate the performance of the Raspberry Pi but basically putting the nvme in there increases the score by a 3,000% it's crazy so clearly you're getting huge performance gains uh from having the nvme in there now the geekbench test is more focused on the CPUs so having faster storage doesn't necessarily translate to a better result but you can still see what we got here if you have the nvme in place you do get the best scores and the Raspberry Pi 5 even with a Micro SD will have uh we have twice as good a score as the Raspberry Pi 4 and one final note is I ran a test on the internal MMC storage on the zimma blade and it was slower than I expected I think it was around 100 mbytes per second so um you would want to upgrade your other sbcs to fast nvmes if possible so ditching the micro SD card and using a super fast nvme is definitely a great way to turbocharge your Raspberry Pi 5 anyways for more cool videos check out this next video

Channel: Data Slayer

Views: 34,948

Keywords: Data Slayer

Id: aLuBstep1Xw

Length: 15min 16sec (916 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 11 2024