Raspberry Pi has announced new accessories for its flagship single-board computer Raspberry Pi 5 – M.2 SSDs under its own brand, available in 256 and 512 GB capacities. New items are supplied complete with everything necessary to connect to the system.
In addition to the SSD itself, the kit includes a Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ (Hardware Attached on Top) module with an M.2 slot, which offers a PCIe 3.0 interface and supports drives of the M.2 2230 form factor. A kit with a 256 GB NVMe SSD will cost $40, and for 512 GB – $55. The drives themselves without connection modules are sold for $10 cheaper; At the same time, the 256 GB version is available for sale now, and the version with 512 GB of space can still be pre-ordered, but it will be available only in November.
It is noteworthy that Raspberry Pi previously stated that the single-board computer only supported PCIe 2.0, but in the raspi-config settings you can set support for PCIe 3.0 – compatible drives, as practice has shown, are indeed supported and speed up the operation of the device. The 256GB SSD offers a claimed performance of 40,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) for random reads of 4KB blocks and 70,000 for random writes; for the 512 GB model this is 50,000 and 90,000 IOPS, respectively.
The manufacturer of the 512 GB drive is Biwin Storage Technology Co. Ltd – OEM supplier for HP and Acer; on the 256 GB version there is no such marking, but it is possible that the manufacturer is the same.