Which NVMe Hat Is Best For The Raspberry Pi 5?

if you don't know already I've been selling these 3D printed cases for raspberry pies online for a few years now with the launch of a number of nbme hats for the p5's PCI Port I get asked quite a lot Which hat is best for it and which case to choose so in today's video I set out to find out these hats have a few common features so let's have a look at those first they all connect to the P5 through an impedance control ribbon cable at the back of the p and then either sit on top of or underneath it they feature an m. 2 m key port that the drive plugs into and although the power supplies power to them directly through the ribbon cable they often have an option for an external power source as well to accommodate these hats I've got two case designs one which takes the Pineberry hat Drive top and another which takes the poni nvme base or the Pineberry hat dve bottom in terms of which physical layout is best I have a preference for the top mounted hat but there also lots of benefits to the bottom mount as well the the top mount allows you to fit a p five active cooler in between the hat and the P so that takes care of cooling the p and you've then got the drive at the top this leaves you plenty of room to add a heat sink to the drive and it actually stays reasonably cool without a heat sink just because it isn't boxed in underneath another board it's also really quick and easy to swap out the drive for a different one if you're switching operating systems or storage the drawbacks of the top mounted Drive are that the Pineberry version is limited to a more compact 2230 and 2242 size Drive Drive these are a little bit less common and more expensive you also don't have access to the P CPU to put a larger cooler like an ice tower onto it and it blocks some of the GPR opens the bottom mount has the mvme drive underneath the P which means you can now access all of the gpio pins and add a larger cooler on top of the CPU you also now have the ability to use 2280 size drives and in the case of the pararon nvme base 2260 drives as well the drawbacks of the bottom mount are that the nvme drive is covered and is in a relatively small space so it does get quite hot you're also Limited in options for a heat sink since it has to be very compact as someone who experiments quite a bit with different operating systems I found having to disassemble the stack to get to the drive the biggest draw back and the main reason why I prefer the top mounted hat so that's a bit of an overview of the physical differences and the pros and cons I'd say that if you tend to need to swap Dr drives around often then You' probably prefer the top mounted hat but if you're happy to install a drive and leave it in place long term then the bottom mount is probably the more versatile option for performance testing I'm going to be testing three different boards first up is the Pineberry hat Drive the Hat Drive top and bottom have the same onboard components in circuitry it's just a different layout so I'll use the Hat Drive top for testing and the results will be a representation of both next is the p cameroni nvme base this offers a wider range of Drive size options than the Hat drive but only comes in a bottom mount variant lastly we've got the geekworm X11 nvme Shield you don't get any additional PCB for your money with this board they've R kept it as compact as possible but similar to the poni base it supports four different Drive sizes but in this case it's a top mount hat in terms of cost from the manufacturer's official websites converted to US doll and excluding shipping the hatra top cost $21 and the bottom variant is a bit more costing $24 the poni mvme base is a bit cheaper at only $14 and the geekworm x101 is a do more than the poni hat at $15 so Pineberries boards are a fair bit more expensive than the other two next let's look at the performance of each hat for this I'm going to use the same raspberry pie with an active cooler installed and I'll use the same nvme drive for each test which I'll just swap between the hats I'm using a sabrin rocket 4 as this drive is listed as officially supported on all of the hats product pages it's also known to be a reliable and fast drive it's probably a little Overkill as it's a Gen 4 drive and the P only supports up to gen 3 but at least we'll know that the drive isn't the bottleneck I'm using a 22 30 size drive so that it's compatible with all of the hats since the Pineberry hat Drive top only supports 2230 and 2242 size Drive to test performance I'm going to be using James Chambers par Benchmark script this Benchmark favors better random read write performance but is a much better representation of how the drive would typically be used as an OS Drive rather than just reading and writing single large files to it this Benchmark will also run on sbc's running most Linux distributions so you can try it out on your setup as well as I mentioned earlier the power only supports PCI Express gen 3 but this is not supported by default so we'll need to modify the P's config file to enable it we just need to add this line to the end of the config file and then reboot the P let's start with testing the Pineberry hat Drive top with the p rebooted we can obviously see our nvme Drive running The Benchmark is as simple as copying one line into your terminal and hit enter I ran the test three times and got the following average results with an average total score of 60,1 next up is the pon nvme base running the same script three times I get the following average results with an average total score of a fractionally lower 5 lastly I tested the geekworm x101 hat I got the following average results with an average total score of scat speed which was within 3% this had the Pineberry hat Drive being the fastest and the geekworm x101 being the slowest this is not all that surprising since the nvme controller is physically located on the nvme drive which we're swapping between the hats these types of hats with a single m.2 port are actually quite simple and most of the onboard components offer power to the drive and the status LED circuitry there could have also been design issues like incorrect impedance matching and this may have affected the results so it was worthwhile doing the test to demonstrate that we're getting similar results from each of them so I guess the results mean that the most significant considerations in making a decision between them are the cost and whether to go with a top or bottom mount hat from our hands-on experience with all three of these boards the Pineberry hat and the pomeron hat seem to be better quality than the geekworm one so the poni one is the best value for money so go with that one if you're happy with the bottom M hat if you you want a top mount hat then decide whether you value the lower price of the geek worm one in favor for slightly better performance or the quality of the Pineberry hat let me know which hat you prefer or if there's some other drives you'd like to see me test with them in the comment section below thanks for watching please remember to like this video If you enjoyed it and subscribe for more Tech and electronics projects tutorials and reviews

Channel: Michael Klements

Views: 12,414

Keywords: Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi 5, Pi 5, NVMe, Storage, SSD, Comparison, TechReview, Gaming, Speed, Technology, Innovation, BestNVMeHat, PiAccessories, FastStorage, Upgrade, Gadget, Performance, Review, Hardware, Maker, Pimoroni, Pineberry, HatDrive, NVMe Base, Geekworm, X1001, Sabrent, Rocket 4.0, PCIe, PCIe Gen 3

Id: Xz-4AoYrx1g

Length: 8min 5sec (485 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2024