How to Add an SSD To Your Raspberry Pi 5 with the M.2 HAT

Jaryd just shared a new tutorial: “How to Add an SSD To Your Raspberry Pi 5 with the M.2 HAT”



SSDs on the Raspberry Pi are not new. For many years now people have been enjoying NVME speeds on Raspberry Pis through the use of NVMe-to-USB adapters. But long gone are the days of annoying adapters flopping around and occupying a precious USB por…

Read more

3 Likes

Is there a case available that will take this combination. i.e. Pi5, active cooling, M.2 PCIE hat with SSD?

Hi John,

I’ve seen reports that the Pi 5 official case can just fit the Hat but the fan plate needs to be moved and users also say the top cover can’t be installed as well. The HAT wasn’t designed for the case so it’s a bonus if it can fit.

As for other cases that should fit the whole package of HAT and active cooler, This open aluminium case, the KKSB Pi 5 Case and the Full Metal Pi 5 should have plenty of room without modification.

If you wanted to look at modifying a case the Pibow Pi 5 case should be able to hold the whole package but the top acrylic plate may require some modification to fit the standoffs.

There are alternative options that do offer a full case for the Pi with an NVMe drive such as the Argon One V3 and Argon Neo 5 which both have optional bases for NVMe drives.

Thanks Aaron. Any guesses about when the hat CE09773 will be available?

Not sure when it’s going to be available at this stage.

Best to sign up for the notifications for when its available on the product page :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Any Idea, How to add an SSD & AI HAT + 26TOPS together?

Hi @Willian296559

Welcome to the forum!

It is physically possible to use both hats by splitting the PCIe connection with PCIe Expansion Board For Raspberry Pi 5 | Buy in Australia | WS-30490 | Core Electronics.

Note that both the AI hat and M.2 drives will be running on the same PCIe lane so bandwidth will be impacted.

To get the best performance out of the AI hat and also be able to write data to a drive I would instead recommend looking at using something like Pimoroni SATA Hard Drive to USB Adapter | Buy in Australia | ADP001 | Core Electronics while it won’t be as fast as NVMe it will mean that the AI hat will be able to be used at its full capacity and will be far faster than an SD card.