It is not clear to me about which M.2 SSD Hat would work in the 4B. Most talk about the RPi 5. Can anyone clarify this for me?
Hey there, @Jeffrey273990, and welcome to the forum. Glad to have you here.
So the short answer is that no, it’s not possible. Or at least not the way it is with the Pi 5.
The Pi 5 happens to have a PCIe cable that allows for an NVMe Drive to be mounted. All of the Pi 5 M.2 HATs take advantage of this PCIe cable both for NVMe boots and for working with AI Chips. When the Pi 5 first came out there was a lot of excitement within the community as it meant that there would finally be away to have greater than USB speed on storage.
Without that PCIe cable, the Pi 4 can’t interface with those NVMe HATs.
On the Pi 4, the only workaround is to use an M.2 SATA drive over USB 3.0, such as the Argon ONE M.2 Case for the Raspberry Pi 4. It will be limited speed compared to PCIe, but it will still be workable for external storage on any project.
Hi! @Jeffrey273990
In my opinion most discussions are about the Raspberry Pi 5, but for the Raspberry Pi 4B, you need to look for M.2 SSD HATs or adapters that support USB 3.0 or PCIe via the 4B’s interface.
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