Pimoroni NVMe Base Duo for Raspberry Pi 5

Add two super-fast NVMe SSDs to your Raspberry Pi 5! Ideal if you need redundancy or just a load more storage on your RPi. Pimoroni’s NVMe Base Duo is a PCIe Gen 2 extension board for Raspberry Pi 5. To use it, simply populate it with one or two M-key NVMe SSDs (2230 to 2280 sizes supported) and mount it under (or over) your Pi for a compact and fast storage solution. It even comes with rubber feet!

It’s the perfect solution for turning your Raspberry Pi 5 into a file server, media centre, reverse proxy, home automation server with built-in backup, etc. – really any task that benefits from large amounts of fast storage, redundancy, or just making use of a couple of spare disks – especially with random high operations per second (IOPS) workloads. In short, it’s a game changer!

NVMe Base Duo follows the new “PIP” design guidelines provided by Raspberry Pi, ensuring that it will be easy to use and supported long-term by updates to Raspberry Pi OS—though it is very early days, and things are improving rapidly there!

NOTE: You cannot boot from NVMe drives installed on NVMe Base Duo. Pimoroni hopes the RPi 5 firmware will support this in the future, but for now, it can only boot from drives that are the root device on the PCIe Bus—i.e., not behind a packet switcher/multiplexer. You’ll need to boot from SD, and then the system can hand over to the pair of fast SSDs!

Comes with:

• NVMe Base Duo PCB with two M.2 slots (M-Key)
• ‘PCIe Flex’ Flat Flex Cable
• 4x Rubber feet
• 4x M2 bolt and 2x 5mm standoffs for SSD mounting
• 4x 12mm M2.5 standoffs for base mounting
• 8x short M2.5 bolts for base mounting 
• 4x 20mm M2.5 bolts for ‘pass-thru’ mounting with a HAT

The folks at Pimoroni recommend running the Raspberry Pi 5 at PCIe Gen 2 x 1 speeds with this Base. The total throughput is around 450MB/sec, or 220MB/sec+ per disk for simultaneous access, as they share the bandwidth through the PCIe switch.

Raspberry Pi 5 is not included. Does not work with Pi 4 or earlier.

Technical Details

For product support, replacement parts and warranty for Pimoroni products visit the Pimoroni forum or contact Pimoroni directly.