Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ Now Available For $12 To Connect NVMe Drives & More

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ Now Available For $12 To Connect NVMe Drives & More

The Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ has finally launched for allowing M.2 devices like NVMe drives, WiFi adapters, accelerators, and more to be connected to the Raspberry Pi 5...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Raspberry-Pi-M2-HAT

[Anux]

Hrrr, 500 MB/s is somewhat useless, SATA 3 has more and with that adapter the size is roughly equal.

[Beach]

$80 Pi5 + $12 M.2 Hat + $14 PSU + $7 Fan + $5 Case + $5 micro HDMI cable

This stuff adds up so fast, that you can get a decent used thin client with more power, more connectors, better software support and less hassle for around the same price.

The times when a Raspberry Pi was a no-brainer are long gone. Now you need a specific use case for it to make sense.

[willmore]

Hrrr, 500 MB/s is somewhat useless, SATA 3 has more and with that adapter the size is roughly equal.

One PCI-E v2.0 lane can only carry 500MB/s which is less than one SATA lane which can carry up to around 550MB/s of actual payload, but NVME is a better protocol than SATA and PCI-E allows devices other than storage to be connected--wireless, compute, etc.

[Chugworth]

The times when a Raspberry Pi was a no-brainer are long gone. Now you need a specific use case for it to make sense.

Over the years I've used Raspberry Pi's to monitor IP cameras. That worked wonderful with omxplayer because the you could have multiple video streams using very little CPU. However, they quit supporting omxplayer and it doesn't run on 64-bit. Now with the Pi 5 they've completely removed H.264 hardware acceleration. The Pi 5 still works great as a Home Assistant controller though.

[L_A_G]

This stuff adds up so fast, that you can get a decent used thin client with more power, more connectors, better software support and less hassle for around the same price.

The times when a Raspberry Pi was a no-brainer are long gone. Now you need a specific use case for it to make sense.

Having worked with other SBCs like ODroid devices I'm going to have disagree on software support and hassle. Because of its popularity software support is on another level to basically any other (ARM) SBC and with it also the level of hassle to get things to work. Other SBCs also require cases, power supplies (an rPi can use your unused phone chargers), they're not as cheap as they used to be and the rPi offers a level of modularity most don't. Only real competitor (IMHO) are second hand x86 thin client type devices on Atom/i3-based hardware (new ones are in a price bracket above the rPi).

No, IMHO the real issue is scope creep. Needing to try and cover as many bases as possible while making it massively overpowered for the kinds of use cases it was originally made for.

On the bright side at least I don't need to upgrade from my old rPi3 Model B because it did its job just fine as a DNS-based adblocker the last time I dug it out of the cupboard.

[monkeynut]

I think if the Zero devices had 1GB ram like the 3+ and below, the feature creep would be less of an issue, but at the moment there isn't a £35 solution.

Edit: In addition, I already have an AliExpress £6 board which does the same job stable at Gen3 speeds and came out before this HAT.

[rclark]

Now you need a specific use case for it to make sense.

Of course. Want a PC? buy a PC or a thin client. That's why I have a 5900X powered workstation for my development.... Want a credit card sized SBC for doing some GPIO work or camera work, or robotics work via I2C or SPI or a hat or ..., buy one of the RPIs. Simple. I use RPIs for all kinds of projects and plenty of software support with the boards which you don't get elsewhere. For example I have an RPI-5 now powering my PDP 11/70 front panel simulator (also works as my Pi-Hole, redis server, and other general services) and another powering my 60s Star Trek computer. Plus several other 4s, 3s, Zeros, Picos running. What's not to like here???? The new RPI-5 has been really nice as it can handle more amps to USB devices and other attached hardware. Plus you can run the USB ports now without sharing bandwidth. So far my 5s have been solid and reliable devices. Running two off M.2 SSDs, two others off of USB external SSDs. One off a SD card. I like.

{edited} -- They could have removed the HDMI ports (or gone down to one). Not very useful as I usually run headless, no keyboard, or mouse. But I am sure they have to cater to those (see posts around mine) that like their GUIs and multi-media apps, or use as a PC....

Who actually buys from AliExpress??? I know I have no need to go there.

[gary7]

I really wish that they had made at least two PCI-E 2 lanes available. Being about the same speed as a SATA interface is not what I really wanted. I have read that some will work at PCI-E 3 speed but I would have to test it extensively to verify that it is reliable and that is not something I have the time or inclination to do. There is also the Pimoroni NVMe base PCI-E adapter that mounts under the Pi 5 leaving the active cooler and expansion connector completely open. However there is no case available for it at this time. I opted for a VESA mount and along with some extra M2.5 hex extenders it works well. A really interesting case for the Pi 5 is the Argon Neo NVMe. It includes a NVMe adapter and an active cooler for about $40 (US). I bought one to make a portable NFS server for my Ryzen 4700U laptop although I am going to have to wait a while to be able buy the Pi 5 (4 GiB), power supply, and RTC. I am also looking for a battery pack that can provide 3 to 3.5 A to a USB C connector to make it all truly portable. Full disclosure, I have no affiliation with ANY of the manufacturers of the products I mentioned. And as a final note, every SBC that I have ever bought requires just as much extra hardware to work as the Raspberry Pi and none of them have any where near the software and community support that it does.

[pong]

Hrrr, 500 MB/s is somewhat useless, SATA 3 has more and with that adapter the size is roughly equal.

Well 500 MB/s is on the low side of throughput wrt. NVME SSDs in general devices, it's not what I'd call "useless".
Compare it to typical eMMC storage in mobile phones / tablets / SBCs over the past few years and it's not so bad.
Also keep in mind the ratio of DRAM BW vs. SSD I/O BW; some of these general sorts of systems don't have very fast/wide DRAM channel interfaces so
the NVME PCIE DMA would end up being a not inconsiderable amount of overhead in RAW transfers compared to available BW for running code etc.

And for space / electronics resource / power / size / cost reduction purposes some of the SSDs are on relatively limited x1 / x2 vs x4 PCIE links and even those may only (general case, not RPI specific) sometimes run at gen-3 speeds so you're not going to get THAT much better on a Gen3x1 link, for instance, though maybe in this case it has more I/F width / speed to work with, IDK.

The thing about SATA is it, too, is a N (3, 6) Gb/s "transceiver/SERDES" based standard so you have all the power / electronic complexity costs associated with implementing it in the SOC/peripheral but then you have all the layers of the SATA associated protocols on top of the Gb/s serial link.

OTOH NVME is just basically PCIE with some thin(ner) NVME layers on top of it so it's really more efficient at the driver / controllers level to implement
while being similarly efficient at the SOC/peripheral HW & power levels.

The thing where SATA is considerably better than NVME for in practice is that at least there's a commonplace, functional, cheap, cable-attachment standard for connecting an x1 link between a SSD and the host so the host doesn't have to incur the size and geometry problems of M.2 slots and
one can hook up 2.5in or bigger SATA drives if one wanted though limited in throughput by the x1 link.

NVME can handle x1...x4 and with a more efficient HW / controller protocol and scales all the way from single-BGA-scale single package level SSDs ( eMMC / SD / CF competition essentially) up to M.2 and beyond but really horrible ecosystem (in practice vs. in theory) of cables / multi-port bays / switches / bifurcators / ....) to allow more scalable tiny-to-significant physical / connectivity aggregation and mechanical considerations.

But 500MB/s / ~ Gen2-x1 speeds is a reasonable "starting point" for NVME which would be ~ competitive with x1 SATA at the least.