We may have thought Raspberry Pi was done with storage announcements for the year, but nope, they’ve dropped their official Raspberry Pi NVMe SSDs on us in the run up to the holiday period. Available in 256GB and 512GB variants initially, these drives are being positioned as the perfect companion for your Pi 5, though interestingly, there’s no mention of Longsys this time around despite their recent partnership on the microSD card front. Given they also make NVMe SSDs, I’d be surprised if they weren’t part of the overall storage partnership.
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How Much Will The Raspberry Pi NVMe Cost?
The drives themselves are being offered either standalone or bundled with the M.2 HAT+ as an SSD Kit, which makes sense. Price-wise, we’re looking at $30 for the 256GB drive on its own or $40 with the HAT+, whilst the beefier 512GB will set you back $45, or $55 if you want the full kit. Not bad pricing considering the current market, though I’ll be curious to see how European pricing shapes up given the recent microSD card price disparity between regions.
Raspberry Pi NVMe: Form Factor?
Curiously, these drives come in an M.2 2230 format which is the smallest of the more common M.2 NVMe SSDs on the market these days. As they’re DRAM-less drives with smaller capacities, perhaps it was not deemed necessary to go with larger PCBs for even M.2 2242 drives (which is the largest their M.2 HAT+ holds).
Are They Fast Though?
Performance-wise, whilst connected at PCIe Gen 2, Raspberry Pi is claiming minimum 4KB random read and write performance of 40k and 70k IOPS on random reads and writes respectively on the 256GB model, and 50k/90k on the 512GB. This should mean that there’s performance on the table if you run your drive in Gen 3 mode!
That’d be nice if they walk the walk as well as talking the talk, and you bet I’ll be putting these through their paces as soon as I can get my hands on them. It’ll be particularly interesting to see how they compare to some of the more popular NVMe options that the community has gravitated towards over the last year (such as the Pinedrive).
When Can I Buy One?
There is a slight catch for those eager to jump on the higher capacity option though. Whilst the 256GB drive and kit are available immediately (in theory), you’ll need to wait until the end of November if you’re after that 512GB variant. Given the time of year, that might impact quite a few Christmas projects, but I suppose having the option to pre-order at some resellers is better than nothing!
Will I be testing them? Of course I will. I’ve got some new storage benchmarks I’ve been working on that should give us a good idea of how these stack up against both the competition and Raspberry Pi’s own A2-rated microSD cards. Keep an eye out for that in the coming weeks, assuming I can get my hands on both capacities without too much trouble.
