Pimoroni Opens Pre-Orders for the PCI Express Gen. 3-Capable NVMe Base for Raspberry Pi 5

Sheffield-based Pimoroni has opened pre-orders for its NVMe Base for Raspberry Pi 5 — an add-on designed to slip beneath the single-board computer and to expose its PCI Express lane as an M.2 M-key slot for Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) solid-state storage.

"NVMe Base is a PCIe extension board for Raspberry Pi 5. Simply populate it with an M-key NVMe SSD (2230 to 2280 sizes supported) and mount it under your Pi for a compact and fast storage solution," the company writes of its design. "It's the perfect solution for turning your Raspberry Pi 5 into a file server, media center, reverse proxy, etc. — really any task that benefits from large amounts of fast storage, especially with random high operations per second (IOPS) workloads. In short it's a game changer!"

A stand-out feature of the Raspberry Pi 5's launch earlier this year was the presence, for the first time in a mainline Raspberry Pi board, of a user-accessible PCI Express Gen. 2 lane for high-speed peripherals. The lane, however, is exposed as a custom flat flexible circuit (FFC) cable connector — and one for which the hardware team at Raspberry Pi has only recently released a specification.

That hasn't stopped third-parties, including Pimoroni, from designing their own adapter boards. The NVMe Base is designed to sit beneath the Raspberry Pi 5 and connect to the FFC connector via an included ribbon cable, converting it to an M.2 M-key slot suitable for 2230, 2242, 2260, and 2280-format M.2 NVMe SSDs. The company claims the adapter is suitable for PCI Express Gen. 3 use — an unofficial mode not formally supported on the Raspberry Pi 5 but which, if stable, can dramatically boost storage performance.

Pimoroni's add-on is highly likely to land before Raspberry Pi's own official PCIe M.2 HAT+, which sits on top of the Raspberry Pi 5 rather than underneath — along with two rival models from Pineberry Pi which offer the choice of a model which sits on top or one to go underneath with room for a larger SSD.

The NVMe Base is now available to pre-order on Pimoroni's web store for $14.29, including FFC cable, mounting hardware, and rubber feet; the device is expected to ship in the first week of January 2024, if not earlier.