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

Got this NVMe for my Pi 5 project, switching from the microSD to the SSD and man what a huge difference using a SSD makes as for performance. Super easy to install and no issues. Fits the Pi 5 perfect and once I mounted the image, everything booted up with no issue. Compatible with most if not all SSD that use the M, BM key.

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.

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.

At more than half the price of the Pineberry with shipping (which I waited 30 days for, compared to Prime's free next day shipping of the Geekworm X1001), this little board installed flawlessly and worked on the first boot. It isn't as picky with M.2 NVME drives as the Pineberry, so I can standardize on the WD SN770, which the Pineberry is incompatible with. So far in testing, I've received the same internal writing speeds as all the other YouTube reviewers of similar products (850MB/sec, but since I write to my device over the network, LAN speeds are governed to about 115MB /sec. It also does not block the cooling fan, as the Pineberry does.If I could return my Pineberry, I would, as I'm not going to purchase special compatible drives to make the board work. Unfortunately, Pineberry is manufactured and shipped from Poland, so it would cost more to ship it back than I would get refunded.I plan to purchase more of these boards and so far, I'm very impressed with them. Simply image them direct, edit the boot files before installation, install and boot. Load times are so fast, the boot process can't be read because they appear and disappear so quickly!

I wanted a simple Network Attached Storage device that I could use as a dropbox between Windows, Linux and MacOS devices on my home network. I also wanted a network Time Machine backup target for my Macs that didn't depend on a router with a USB port for a USB disk. Looking at available NAS devices, I didn't want to pay $600+ (after disks) for a lot of bells and whistles I simply did not need. So I bought this to make my own Network Attached Storage (NAS) device out of a Raspberry Pi 5. To be clear, this is NOT a plug-and-play device for novices. You have to have a working knowledge of Linux and NVMe SSDs (at a minimum) to make this work.In the end, I was able to achieve my goal with this device and it has worked solidly for over 6 months now. That said, it was quite frustrating finding an NVMe SSD that worked well with this peripheral. Neither the manufacturer nor the online help/chat groups were a lot of help as there were many contradictions in the advice and experience of participants. In the end, I was able to make it work with the Orico line of SSDs, (specifically https://a.co/d/99ZZOK0). I probably could have found a nice Samsung SSD that worked, but I was trying to keep the cost down. I originally was going to give it 3 stars over the frustration of finding a compatible SSD, but I opted to give it 4 stars for how well it's worked after solving the SSD dilemma.Note: This is a single SSD device, so there is no option for a RAID configuration to protect your data should the SSD fail or otherwise become corrupt.All that said, once I got this working, it works really well. Exponentially faster than using a SD card as is default for Raspberry Pi. And you can use it as your primary boot device once configured.