Jay Doscher's NVMe Quick Kit Is a Rugged, Raspberry Pi 5-Powered Solid-State Backup Gadget

Maker Jay Doscher has unveiled another of his ruggedized portable Raspberry Pi builds, this time designed for rapid data synchronization with an eye on security: the NVMe Quick Kit.

"Most of my deck builds are concepts, intended to be as open-ended as possible. Today I'm sharing one with a very specific purpose: to sync critical data as securely as possible," Doscher writes of the new project. "'Securely' will mean a wide spectrum of different things to different people, but for me I want a host with a copy of data that can't easily be accessed from other systems. This is almost a one-way copy box. What is different here is that I'm not just showing the design this time, I am going to give some specific examples of how I'm doing it, and how you can too."

Doscher is no stranger to a Raspberry Pi-powered portable, having unveiled the original Quick Kit — a more compact, easier-to-build variant on the Raspberry Pi Recovery Kit he showed off a year earlier — back in 2020. The NVMe Quick Kit is, as the name suggests, based on the Quick Kit design — but the Raspberry Pi 4 Model has been swapped out for the more powerful Raspberry Pi 5, which provides a user-accessible single-lane PCI Express Gen. 2 connection to which Doscher has connected a pair of Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSDs.

The NVMe Quick Kit puts its hardware in a 3D-printed framework, designed to slot into a rugged Pelican 1150 case without modification. In addition to the Raspberry Pi and its drives, there's a heatsink and fan assembly, the official Raspberry Pi 7" Touchscreen Display, and a dual NVMe HAT to split the PCIe lane into two M.2 slots for the NVMe drives. "The frame on the back does something fairly important," Doscher notes: "it keeps you from resting the entire internal chassis on those NVMe drives, which are quite fragile."

"I use it for keeping backup copies of important configuration files and database exports," Doscher says of the build. "I want multiple copies over time of the same data. The [Raspberry] Pi 5 is probably the best Pi suited for a task like this, but there are some serious limitations. First, rsync usually uses all available cores for copies, so the faster the Pi the better. While you can run this on an older Pi with say, a USB hard drive, the throughput of both the Ethernet and a USB hard drive will probably not be quite what you'd expect for performance."

A bigger issue reared its head in the form of power. "None of my standard USB [Type-]C adapters could power this sufficiently — unless I was using my Dell laptop 60W USB C power supply," Doscher says. "Not my little Anker, but it's a few years old and it may not be all the bricks themselves, but I can say with confidence all my older designs' USB C panel mounts can't handle the amps getting pulled by the Pi and two NVMe drives. That's why I ended up with the large port at the bottom, so I can easily pop out the display and plug directly into the Pi 5 itself."

Full details, including setup instructions and source code for a backup script, are available on Doscher's website; printable STL files are available for paid subscribers at the $5 level or higher, with CAD files available at higher tiers.