Pineboards HatDrive! Top (NVMe 2230, 2242 GEN 3) for Raspberry Pi 5

Mine has been performing flawlessly for months. I use it with a 5A power supply, the official Pi Active Cooler and the Cytron NVMe 2242 M-Key MakerDisk SSD

Overall, this is a great product. I own the Pineboard.io NVMe Top HAT and Bottom HAT, as well as the Coral + NVMe board (bought while in EU for delivery there). One issue is the NVMe posts come in at least two varieties. One is a small post, secured with a nut from the bottom. The other is a taller post secured by a screw from the bottom with a collar to catch the NVMe board. One of the small posts broke while attaching the nut. The short posts work better attaching some NVMe drives while the long posts work better in other cases. Double-sided NVMe drives where the board is raised in the rear and single sided boards sit at different heights with heat sinks attached. Both posts should be included, with extras.I also wish every PCIe board included a second "daisy chain" PCIe connector to allow stacking (without the dedicated 2 or 4 port expander. The daisy chain connector should be able to be "turned off" to allow NVMe booting as needed, which presumably two or more devices would prevent.I was pleased to learn the Bottom HAT (galoshes?) aren't flush with the front ports, which allows mounting in rackmounts or some cases.

I remember when the pi 5 was first released, pineboards.io (then pineberry pi) was one of the first to announce a set of NVMe boards to connect to the pi 5’s PCIe connector. They had the HatDrive! Top and Bottom.In the early days, firmware issues prevented certain drives/controllers from booting, or outright didn’t recognize certain drives. It was a spotty situation. Over time, as firmware improved, so did the drive support.Looking to build a pi 5 cluster, I wanted to go all-out on performance: active cooling, POE, and disk I/O. That’s where the HatDrive! Top comes in: supporting the override to PCIe gen 3, and shipping with shielded FPC ribbon cables to match, this was my first choice.Coupled with their pinedrive, a 256GB NVMe 2242 drive, I set about installing it in one of my pi 5s.I had to forego the provided risers, they were not high enough: using an Armor Lite 5 active cooler, there just was not enough clearance. Digging through my inventory of M2.5 risers, along with 40-pin risers, I was able to mount the HatDrive! Top above the cooler (with about 0.5-0.75 centimeter clearance) and I was off to the races.`lspci` saw things. `dmesg` saw things.The `config.txt` settings to force pcie gen 3 appeared to work (according to `dmesg` output).Using `piclone`, I cloned my SD card to the pinedrive.A quick visit to `rpi-eeprom-config` to set the boot order, and I was almost set!A reboot failed. Plugging the SD card in though booted, and it used the NVMe for `/` and `/boot`.This is the 2023/V1 board, so perhaps there’s a newer version out there. I had to also set `PCIE_PROBE=1` in the `rpi-eeprom-config`, and then it was able to boot unassisted.It works!

This is 1 of the most well made Pi 5 PCIe NVMe board. It performs slight better than all other boards. The only reason I'm giving it a 4-start instead of 5 is the short PCIe flat cable. I use a thicker active cooler with heatsink so I had to find another PCIe cable to get everything work. I'm thinking about evaluating the Pineberry Top board since the Bottom board performs so well.

This device uses the same reference design as anyone else. But the issue is that many common SSDs (Phaison controller, like WD_BLACK) do not work with Raspberry Pi 5 at this time.Rapsberry Pi 5 is still working on getting more full support for NVMe SSDs (as this connects) so right now the hardware just isn't that useful. Also because the software support is changing a lot right now it's a bit hard to find the proper up-to-date way to turn on NVMe SSD support on a Pi install.This is only for the adventurous right now. I cannot recommend it. Over the rest of 2024 I do expect that Raspberry Pi will add more support and hopefully NVMe SSDs will be a fully supported feature by next Pi day.