Pineberry Pi’s Pi 5 PCIe SSD Adapters

One of the main features of the Raspberry Pi 5 is its PICe connector, which opens up the board to advanced integration with downstream devices. But, until now, there wasn’t an adapter that took advantage of the Pi 5’s PCIe capabilities. Enter, Pineberry Pi, a new company out of Poland making accessories for the Pi 5.

Hat Drives!

Pineberry Pi launched two different models of the HatDrive! The HatDrive! Top, which has the common Pi HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) form factor. And a larger HatDrive! Bottom, as the name implies, attaches to the bottom of the Pi 5.

There are a few differences in functionality between the Top and Bottom versions but the main thing to know is that the Top adapter accepts the smaller 2230 and 2242 form-factor SSDs. Since the Bottom adapter has the same footprint as the Pi 5, it can accept full-size 2280 SSDs, in addition to the 2230 and 2242 sizes.

Both adapters come with almost everything you need to get that fast SSD hooked up to your Pi 5. Pineberry Pi includes a ribbon cable, stand-offs, screws, and a GPIO riser for the Top version. The only thing you have to buy separately is the NVMe drive.

HAT Features

The cable provided with the HatDrive is capable of providing enough juice to power the SSD, so there is no obvious need to connect the GPIO riser if you are not planning on using the power monitoring features. The Bottom version has an optional power connector, but again, this is a “nice to have” feature as the power supplied by the Pi’s PCIe connector is enough to power the SSD.

My favorite feature of these boards is not the improvements in drive speed but rather how streamlined my Pi 5 setup is now. I was using an external SSD with a USB adapter and the coiled cable always bugged me (since the Pi 4 times).

Here’s a video where I take a more in-depth view of how the Pineberry Pi Top and Bottom adapters work with the Raspberry Pi 5.

Making it Work

There are a couple of changes you have to make to your Pi 5 configuration before the HatDrives can work with your Pi. First, you have to edit /boot/config.txt to enable the PCIe connector on the Pi.

I wish Pineberry Pi would provide this information on the website as this is vital to make their hardware work with the Pi 5.

# add to top of /boot/config.txt file
dtparam=pciex1

If you are planning on booting the Pi 5 from the SSD connected to PCIe, you also have to edit the boot order. To do this, open the terminal and follow the commands below.

sudo rpi-eeprom-config --edit

This will open the eeprom configuration file in the Nano text editor. Next, change the BOOT_ORDER value to 0xf416 and add PCIE_PROBE=1. The lines in the configuration file should look like the below.

PCIE_PROBE=1
BOOT_ORDER=0xf416

To save your changes in Nano and exit, press “ctrl+x”, then press “y”. Make sure to reboot the Pi as the changes are only saved to eeprom when the system restarts.

You can check all the details regarding boot order on Raspberry Pi’s website but, in summary, the value above will make the Pi 5 look for a bootable drive connected to the PCIe connector, then the SD drive, then USB, and loop over/restart if a bootable media is not found.

Raw Performance

Disk IO speeds through the PCIe connector are on another level when compared to other media types. Let’s take a look at some pretty charts.

PCIe Gen 2 speeds are slightly better than when using a USB 3 to SSD or NVME adapter. But, as you can see below, Gen 3 speeds are on a whole different scale.

To force the Pi 5 to use Gen 3 speeds, you have to add the line below to /boot/configt.txt.

dtparam=pciex1_gen=3

A word of caution on Gen 3. Although the Raspberry Pi 5 can do Gen 3 speeds, it is only certified for Gen 2. I have been using Gen 3 with a Sabrent 512GB NVMe SSD and it has been working with no issues, but, use Gen 3 at your own risk.

The story is a little different when comparing random write and read speeds. Keep in mind that sequential reads and writes are relevant for saving large files or transferring information; random writes and reads are applicable to OS operations, where a large number of small files are read and written to disk.

Here you can see that even PCIe Gen 2 speeds are so much faster than USB 3.0 speeds and there is only a slight improvement to speeds when using PCIe Gen 3.

Conclusion

At €20 for the top version and €25 for the bottom version, they are not the cheapest adapters out there. It will be interesting to see adapters that can serve more purposes than just one. By the time you spend 22-27 dollars for the adapter and another 20-60 dollars for an M.2 SSD, your Pi 5 setup can get pretty expensive.

Things I like: The top adapter is my favorite so far. I like how streamlined it is and how it can easily fit on the outside of my passive-cooled case. This is a big change from the external SSD I was using (since the Pi 4 times). No more coiled cables.

Things I don’t like: I wish the top adapter had a cutout for the camera and display cables. The bottom adapter is a bit clunky and there aren’t any available cases in the market that can fit a Pi 5 with a bottom adapter.

Affiliate Links

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Sabrent 1TB NVME SSD: https://amzn.to/421qdTA
Crucial 1TB SSD: https://amzn.to/3RVZhRu
KIOXIA 128GB NVME Drive: https://amzn.to/40ihueF
SanDisk Ultra microSD: https://amzn.to/47ekIlY