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.
“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.
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.
Even the tested list you need to take with a grain of salt, my Lexar NM710 which I bought just for it was on the list and was at discount at the time I got my base board, it do work flawlessly for a while, but if the system is idle for a while (like over night), then the Lexar is gone until you reboot the RPI5.
It’s annoying when your root device is gone, not much you can do.
Another big warning, about SSDs in general - if they’re not powered on for a while, the contents may well be lost after as little as a year.
SSDs need to self refresh, which is done by their internal controller but only when they’re powered on. For archive purposes, a removable spinning drive might be a better choice.
For my PC, I use USB powered USB3 ones but that might be an issue when using one with a Pi. USB hard drives above 5GB, and some smaller ones, have a separate wall wart style power supply, so that sort might be a better choice.
I have seen posts like this on many forums, but nobody has given a valid reference for the source of information. There is a single article from anandtech that at least quotes a source (data from Intel, not from a SSD manufacturer!), but this information is very specific and not generally applicable.
This is not to say you are principally wrong, but I don’t think it is that relevant to users adding SSDs to their Pi5.
Try googling a precised version of what I said, e.g.
SSDs not powered on, contents may be lost after as little as a year
You’ll find plenty to support that. Drives that have been written to more will lose their contents quicker, but they all will after a while, which makes a spinning drive more suitable for archiving than and SSD.
Please post some links to documents that actually cite (reference) something that is more than just a claim. I find tons of google hits, but none of these will give anything substantial.
I am just interested in facts. First you make a claim about data retention of SSDs. Then you make a claim about “plenty” hits that support your claim. And then?!
There is no need to extend this discussion. It should only be clear to readers not to just believe things they read in posts as long as there are no facts that support the written word.