BIG word of caution when selecting an NVME

Discussion Raspberry Pi
1

I purchased the NVME Base through Adafruit. I have had many years of good service with spinning disks with Western digital and my current nvme in my oldish laptop is a 500G SSD WD Blue 3D NAND SATA M.2 2280. It has been working flawlessly for years.

I bought an NVME WD Black N850X 2TB on Amazon and finally, I thought I’d have my dream of hosting my family photo archives (going back to images from the 1870s) on a low powered device with 2TB.

Ack! Not on that drive. My fault, of course, but I would like adafruit, and pimoroni to put a notification (there’s nothing on the adafruit site) and higher in your page about the hit & miss compatibility with different manufacturers.

I’ll eat this one (~$160), but please… don’t let this happen to others.

Thanks,
Chris.

2

Does seem to be an area with significant interoperability issues - at least on RPi.

However, Pimorini do publish a list and warnings - see the end of their product page.

1 Like
3

“end of their product page” - you’ve probably seen the acronym TL;DR. Obviously, I failed to read below. Sadly, I never came to the pimoroni site to even know there were issues. I was naively thinking I just needed to know it was nvme, m.2, 2880 sized, and then… how big and at what cost.

All that said, I’ve concluded that all is not lost because I CAN still use it as a mounted drive. I have been able to see the drive with lsblk. It all seemed to fall apart when I could not mount it as the primary boot drive. I stopped obsessing about that and so, it seems, I can still boot, as always from the microsd, and store all my photos on the nvme drive. Not ideal, but a reasonable fallback.

This morning I wrote a python script to create 1000 files of random sizes, then read each file and add some content at the end. Seems flawless so far. And fast. No special settings in /boot/firmware/config.txt

I still think a warning should be higher on the page, and in red, but that’s just me… I’ve also suggested the same on the adafruit forums.

Thanks,
Chris.

4

It’s weird, I’m in this boat as well. I went and got a Crucial T500 2TB NVME SSD and was like “yeah it’ll work.”

Well, it did once! And now it doesn’t work at all in the Pi5. I have seen their other posts where they talk about power consumption and whatnot, so I’m not sure if that’s the issue. I believe I now have some flavor of Samsung in my RPi5, but that also doesn’t work.