I hadn’t realised that m.2 came in SATA and PCIe flavours and ordered a SATA m.2. Will it work or do I need to find a PCIe one?
Short answer: you need a NVMe m.2 SSD for the NVMe base.
I think there is some confusion here:
- m.2 is a form factory (“chewing gum”)
- SATA and PCIe are physical interfaces
- SATA and NVMe are protocols
You can buy m.2 SSDs with SATA or with PCIe physical interfaces. Both are very similar. But they will use different plug types to avoid confusion. SATA uses B+M keyed physical plugs (it has two notches), while PCIe only uses M.
Kingston, one of the larger sellers of m.2 SSDs claimed that they sold their last m.2-SATA in Dec 2022. So NVMe is the way to go. Unless you have older hardware that needs the old interface.
Thank you, I will ditch (repurpose) the one I purchased and find another
Yeah, repurpose is fine. For us normal users the performance difference between SATA and NVMe is probably not noticeable. My Pi4 “desktop” uses the SATA variant (in an USB-enclosure) since I bought the Pi4, and it works just fine.
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Good points here. Be aware as I was looking at this two days ago (21Dec) and found cheaper NVMe m.2 storage from a well known source (starting with the letter A’). It wasn’t until I looked at the detailed specification that I found they were flogging off SATA based memory.
Just got a Pimoroni e-mail with really good news. Pi 5’s are in stock for purchase, and all the Batch 2 Pre-orders will be shipping in the New Year. And Batch 1 of the NVMe Base will also be shipping. =)
My Pi 5 Pre order was batch 2, and my NVMe batch 1. =)
Shouldn’t be too long before we are hands on. ;)