Wanted • Re: Best Price/Performance for RPi 5 + NVMe SSD Hat + Cooling Case — What Do You Use?

• Decent NVMe speeds from the SSD HAT

What do you mean by "Decent [...] speeds"?

You can't expect anything near the maximum rated speeds of an NVMe drive* because the Pi5 simply doesn't have enough PCIe lanes of the correct generation. You can expect an improvement over SD card though and a small increase over the same drive connected via USB3 (more if you push the PCIe lane speed to gen3).

Most available NVMe drives are designed around four PCIe lanes of gen3, gen4, or at the high end gen 5. The Pi5 has a single lanes rated for gen2 that can be pushed to gen3 with good weather and a following wind.

Each generation roughly doubles the speed of the bus without changing the number of lanes so, for example, an NVMe drive designed for four lanes at gen3 has 1/8 of the bandwidth it expetcs.

Oh, and you might want to review how the [ list] tags work.

*: Unless, of course, the drive is designed for a single gen2 lane or lower.

Statistics: Posted by thagrol — Thu Sep 18, 2025 1:56 pm

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