Geekworm X1001 PCIe to M.2 HAT Key-M NVMe SSD PIP PCIe Peripheral Board for Raspberry Pi 5 Support M.2 2230/2242/2260/2280 SSD

Fantastic, easy to use, never using sd card w pi again!

I already have a ‘Pineberry hat bottom’ for my other raspberry pi 5. I got another pi 5 and decided to try the Geekworm because it was readily available on Amazon and at $16 it’s very well priced.. It mounts on standoffs with three screws. Another reviewer complained about the double female standoffs making it hard to mount in a case, but if you use slightly longer (2.5 x 12mm) screws, you can mount it through the bottom of a standard Raspberry pi 5 factory case. It was easy to install, and unlike the bottom hat does not block access to the SD card. Also, because it’s only half width it does not block the Pi active cooler. Even with my pi overclocked to 2.9 GHz (+20%) temps under stress-ng, cpu/gpu 100% load temps were below 75C and normal temps were in the mid 40s.I used a Kingston m.2 2280 512GB pcie 4x4 SSD because I had one around. The system boots reliably from that drive and I get around 850 MB/s sequential reads and 750 MB/s writes. I have stress tested the SSD at pcie 3 speed with no issues and it did not require heat sink. Some reviewers have complained about an inability to boot from WD drives. This is not a problem with the adapter but instead is a known issue with the Raspberry Pi. Hopefully this will get sorted out over time.There were some other reviewers who complained about power. Most SSDs will work fine from the 5 watts that is available from the pcie cable. That limit is imposed by the raspberry pi, not by the adapter. If you need more power, the connector is a standard 2.54 mm JST, and you can readily buy a cable here on Amazon. But virtually all pcie 3 drives and most pcie 4 drives of 2 TB or below will work within the 5 watt window, especially considering that only one pcie lane is a use.My only complaint is that the activity light stays on all the time. unlike the Pineberry, it does not blink when the drive is accessed. Other than that I’m perfectly happy with it.

This NVME hat thing works well with my Pi5. It rightfully urges you to use the 27W Pi5 charger that can do 5a at 5v so don't overlook that. The obvious great thing about this mod is how much faster the Pi5 runs, loads, transfers etc. It really makes a difference, at least with the 8GB Pi5.Couple things to watch out for. If you are thinking this will fit in a case, it probably won't because of the chonk 5v input on top of the board. It sticks out higher than the rest of the board and prevents me from putting the lid back on my case by a micron. Also know that the LED indicator light flashes like a strobe light with a brightness equal to 1000 suns.

Super solid, works great. As it's HAT+ specification you might not actually need to add to these lines to /boot/firmware/config.txt but I did anyways:# Enable the PCIe external connectordtparam=pciex1# Force Gen 3.0 speedsdtparam=pciex1_gen=3And what I'm getting with a Sabrent 1TB PCIe 4:jazzy@pi-five:~ $ sudo nvme listNode Generic SN Model Namespace Usage Format FW Rev--------------------- --------------------- -------------------- ---------------------------------------- --------- -------------------------- ---------------- --------/dev/nvme0n1 /dev/ng0n1 48790459505660 Sabrent SB-ROCKET-NVMe4-1TB 1 1.00 TB / 1.00 TB 512 B + 0 B RKT4B5.1jazzy@pi-five:~ $ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/nvme0n1p2/dev/nvme0n1p2:Timing cached reads: 4322 MB in 2.00 seconds = 2164.56 MB/secTiming buffered disk reads: 2244 MB in 3.00 seconds = 747.52 MB/secjazzy@pi-five:~ $ fio --name=writefile --size=1G --filesize=1G --filename=/tmp/fiotest.tmp --bs=1M --nrfiles=1 --direct=1 --sync=0 --randrepeat=0 --rw=write --refill_buffers --end_fsync=1 --iodepth=200 --ioengine=libaiowritefile: (g=0): rw=write, bs=(R) 1024KiB-1024KiB, (W) 1024KiB-1024KiB, (T) 1024KiB-1024KiB, ioengine=libaio, iodepth=200fio-3.33Starting 1 processJobs: 1 (f=1)writefile: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=3385: Sat Jan 20 22:33:28 2024write: IOPS=773, BW=774MiB/s (812MB/s)(1024MiB/1323msec); 0 zone resetsslat (usec): min=31, max=5255, avg=42.96, stdev=163.15clat (msec): min=54, max=512, avg=251.31, stdev=94.73lat (msec): min=54, max=512, avg=251.35, stdev=94.72clat percentiles (msec):| 1.00th=[ 55], 5.00th=[ 55], 10.00th=[ 104], 20.00th=[ 209],| 30.00th=[ 257], 40.00th=[ 257], 50.00th=[ 257], 60.00th=[ 257],| 70.00th=[ 257], 80.00th=[ 257], 90.00th=[ 380], 95.00th=[ 447],| 99.00th=[ 498], 99.50th=[ 506], 99.90th=[ 510], 99.95th=[ 514],| 99.99th=[ 514]bw ( KiB/s): min=790528, max=794624, per=100.00%, avg=792576.00, stdev=2896.31, samples=2iops : min= 772, max= 776, avg=774.00, stdev= 2.83, samples=2lat (msec) : 100=9.67%, 250=14.36%, 500=75.20%, 750=0.78%cpu : usr=18.15%, sys=3.10%, ctx=1033, majf=0, minf=8IO depths : 1=0.1%, 2=0.2%, 4=0.4%, 8=0.8%, 16=1.6%, 32=3.1%, >=64=93.8%submit : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%complete : 0=0.0%, 4=99.9%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.1%issued rwts: total=0,1024,0,0 short=0,0,0,0 dropped=0,0,0,0latency : target=0, window=0, percentile=100.00%, depth=200Run status group 0 (all jobs):WRITE: bw=774MiB/s (812MB/s), 774MiB/s-774MiB/s (812MB/s-812MB/s), io=1024MiB (1074MB), run=1323-1323msecDisk stats (read/write):nvme0n1: ios=3/972, merge=30/0, ticks=16/217358, in_queue=217374, util=84.17%jazzy@pi-five:~ $ fio --name=readfile --size=1G --filesize=1G --filename=/tmp/fiotest.tmp --bs=1M --nrfiles=1 --direct=1 --sync=0 --randrepeat=0 --rw=read --refill_buffers --end_fsync=1 --iodepth=200 --ioengine=libaioreadfile: (g=0): rw=read, bs=(R) 1024KiB-1024KiB, (W) 1024KiB-1024KiB, (T) 1024KiB-1024KiB, ioengine=libaio, iodepth=200fio-3.33Starting 1 processJobs: 1 (f=1)readfile: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=3392: Sat Jan 20 22:33:36 2024read: IOPS=828, BW=828MiB/s (869MB/s)(1024MiB/1236msec)slat (usec): min=21, max=532, avg=58.84, stdev=73.93clat (msec): min=35, max=476, avg=236.92, stdev=86.88lat (msec): min=35, max=476, avg=236.98, stdev=86.83clat percentiles (msec):| 1.00th=[ 37], 5.00th=[ 58], 10.00th=[ 109], 20.00th=[ 211],| 30.00th=[ 241], 40.00th=[ 241], 50.00th=[ 241], 60.00th=[ 241],| 70.00th=[ 241], 80.00th=[ 241], 90.00th=[ 355], 95.00th=[ 414],| 99.00th=[ 464], 99.50th=[ 472], 99.90th=[ 477], 99.95th=[ 477],| 99.99th=[ 477]bw ( KiB/s): min=839680, max=849920, per=99.58%, avg=844800.00, stdev=7240.77, samples=2iops : min= 820, max= 830, avg=825.00, stdev= 7.07, samples=2lat (msec) : 50=4.30%, 100=4.88%, 250=72.36%, 500=18.46%cpu : usr=0.00%, sys=5.43%, ctx=994, majf=0, minf=12808IO depths : 1=0.1%, 2=0.2%, 4=0.4%, 8=0.8%, 16=1.6%, 32=3.1%, >=64=93.8%submit : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%complete : 0=0.0%, 4=99.9%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.1%issued rwts: total=1024,0,0,0 short=0,0,0,0 dropped=0,0,0,0latency : target=0, window=0, percentile=100.00%, depth=200Run status group 0 (all jobs):READ: bw=828MiB/s (869MB/s), 828MiB/s-828MiB/s (869MB/s-869MB/s), io=1024MiB (1074MB), run=1236-1236msecDisk stats (read/write):nvme0n1: ios=949/0, merge=0/0, ticks=200810/0, in_queue=200811, util=92.38%

using it with 2tb ssd, but have my OS installed on an sd card because apparently the hat can't give enough power to the ssd and it can freeze. There is a way to power the ssd separately but I just didn't want to do that, because I want it to stay lean, but with OS on an sd card it works fine so far

Easy fit. Cable was not difficult to install. Holds the 1TB SSD and easy to configure in the boot.config.Loaded the OS on it and made it the boot drive.

It was easy to install I added a heat-sink to mine, since it was getting pretty warm when I used it! Less than 5 minutes to install. I cloned my SD Card and now boot from the M.2 SSD. It's faster than the SD card.

Works flawlessly with various sticks I've tried. Booting directly to nvme is amazing for write intensive workloads. No power issues at all.