I’ve got this NVMe board for the Raspberry pi5.
On the space with the 5V; I’m guessing you can solder some extra power on that spot.
My question: Is this to solder an extra power source onto or to solder the GND and 5V pins from the Raspberry Pi itself with some wire ?
Extra power source, or Raspberry pins?
I greatly appreciate your answer. Cheers!
I do believe those pads are for an SMT power connector. Like what’s on the Tufty etc. It’s for batteries on the Tufty but the same idea. It’s just not populated with a jack during production
There is nothing stopping you from just soldering a couple of wires on the +5V and - (GND) pads though. If I was going to do it I’d likely use something like this.
Dual pin jumper wire (pimoroni.com)
I’d cut the connectors off one end, and strip and solder them to the NVMe Board. Then plug the other end into the +5 and GND pins on the Pi 5 GPIO header. I’d want at least one end unpluggable.
Oddly Pimoroni don’t seem to sell them, but yes, it looks exactly like the footprint for a JST-SH socket. Paul has, in the past, recommended soldering plain headers and using jumper wires instead.
We used to have pin headers on batch 1 of NVMe, but they expose copper on the bottom, and since that’s useful as protection/skeleton case, we went to this SMT JST header for future batches.
They are nominally to supply extra power from the GPIO 5v/GND pins for the NVMe Base, but we’ve never seen a case where they are needed or help with a single drive. Same situation with dual drives as well tbh
At 4 drives, if you have 4 power-hungry ones, then you need to think about extra power lines above the ribbon cable.
The combination of relatively low speed single-lane PCIe 2/3 and efficient modern NVMe drives just makes it not a problem in 99% of cases.
