PCIe M.2 HAT+ for Raspberry Pi 5, NVMe SSD PIP PCIe Peripheral Board With Extra Screw Sets for 2280/2260/2242/2230 NVMe SSD

Having tried a couple of M.2 hats, I found this one to be super easy and good value for money. The board shape does not interfere with the PCIe ribbon in the smallish enclosure type that I use (another popular model does). I've not benchmarked it performance-wise. Moving off of the SD card really unleashes PI5 performance, and this is a low-cost way to make that happen. FWIW: it is worth installing a heatsink/cooler set at the same time if you don't have one, faster IO is no fun if thermal throttling kicks in-- enjoy.

I ordered this to move my PiOS off the SD card for faster OS speed, with the plan to turn my Pi into a micro-sized file server.Installation was easy, but then the trouble began as I installed an old WD SN770 onto it, and it wouldn't run. Further research led me to find that WD drives don't work well with RPi in general, but I had an Adata drive that I did manage to get working later that afternoon, so it's all good now. Now I've got a box about 4" tall with a USB external drive for mass storage and the Pi's NVMe making sure files are transferring across the network at a decent speed.And of course, the miniature size is extremely portable, which is great for my lifestyle--my partner's a traveling industrial construction worker, so we relocate to a new job site on average every 2-6 months, packing everything we need to live/work/play in a pickup...which makes small-scale items like this or items that can be folded down to smaller sizes essential. Building out this Pi server has let me cut down our NAS to about 1/8 of its previous volume--it cost a bit to buy a new larger 2.5" drive that I put into an external enclosure, but it's been so worth it!

Picked up the iUniker PCIe M.2 HAT+ for Raspberry Pi 5 so I could add a zippy NVMe drive to my Pi 5 and ditch the slow SD card.The iUniker kit includes mounting screws, standoffs and insulators. The PCIe cable was already attached to the card so it just needed to be plugged into the Pi 5 board. Although shown in the images, my kit did not include a piece of thermal tape.Installation was straightforward and the basic instructions tell you what you need to add to the config files to get the board and a drive to work. The board sits nicely above the Pi 5 board leaving plenty of room for an official Pi active cooler below it. The Pi 5 with the PCIe board/drive fits easily into my GeekPi metal case with plenty of clearance.For me, the installation and setup was not as easy as I had hoped. This really should have been a ten minute job, but it took a lot longer for me. The issue wasn't an problem with the iUniker board, but rather the drive I had plugged into it. The Western Digital SN530 drive I used WAS recognized and I was even able to load Bookworm and boot from it, but the board/drive kept being disabled upon reboots unless I unplugged the power completely between boots. The problem exhibited itself as the red read/write light on the iUniker card staying solidly-lit during reboots. A few searches will turn up many users having issues with using Western Digital SSDs on their HAT+ boards. I eventually tried another drive (a Kioxia) and all the problems and weirdness magically and instantly went away.Now I have a Pi 5 booting and running off an internally-mounted SSD. The Pi 5 boots quickly and things definitely feel faster in use. So, in spite of the minor issues I experienced, the iUniker PCIe M.2 HAT+ for Raspberry Pi 5 gets five stars.

As I recently discovered that PI 5 is able to boot native from an M2 SSD. I immediately went out and got this adapter to see what a difference it would make. The solution is extremely simple to cable up, PCIe ribbon is the right length and it takes all of five seconds to put to hook it up. It comes with all the standoffs you'll need to mount it topside on your PI. And I can confirm that the cut out on the board leaves plenty of room to let you access the GPIO header with a standard breakout cable. It's tight but it fits just fine.It worked out of the box with no issues and a few different drives that I have on hand. I have zero issues recommending this HAT to anyone wanting to move into the speeds of an SSD for boot up and storage.

Have a case that you really don't want to part with? This M.2 adapter fits on TOP of the RPi5, unlike most others which fit below it. If the RPi5 is naked without a case, it's perfect to put an NVMe on bottom, but if there's a case involved, it likely just won't fit. This iUniker adapter is mostly nice in that it fits the M.2 adapter on top of the RPi5, so the RPi5 can still sit comfy in its case.It's not entirely roses though, as this really blocks access to the DSI/CSI connectors so those will need to go in first and be folded/bent to accommodate fitting around the side opening of this adapter. Any PIO HATs will need a 40pin extender to lift all those pins up to beyond where the M.2 resides, and if a heatsink is on the M.2 for cooling, then additional risers are needed, and don't come included.And while the RPi fan fits with this adapter installed, it reduces the effective cooling a bit. With the included holes in the adapter, the RPi fan does help keep the M.2 a bit cooler.Of other note, not all dual-sided M.2 might fit as the ribbon connector might get in the way of the underside M.2 components. Just something to be aware of. The only dual-sided M.2 I have lucky avoids it by a little so it barely fits. Most of my M.2 to try are all single sided.Not to the fault of this adapter, but RPi OS normally comes with only PCIe2 by default, so for faster SSDs will need to set in the config.txt:dtparam=pciex1dtparam=pciex1_gen=3