Raspberry Pi Launches the M.2 HAT+, Improves NVMe Boot Help within the Raspberry Pi 5 Firmware

Raspberry Pi has formally launched the M.2 HAT+, its first official accent to utilize the PCI Categorical lane out there on the brand new Raspberry Pi 5 — whereas a firmware patch for the board brings preliminary help for booting from Non-Unstable Reminiscence Categorical (NVMe) storage behind a PCI Categorical swap, as discovered on third-party PCIe add-on boards.

“The Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ allows you to join M.2 M-key peripherals, resembling NVMe drives and AI [Artificial Intelligence] accelerators, to your Raspberry Pi 5,” explains Raspberry Pi’s James Adams of the launch at present. “It supplies quick (as much as 500MB/s) knowledge switch to and from these peripherals, and is that can be purchased at present, from our community of Accepted Resellers, priced at simply $12.”

Raspberry Pi introduced the M.2 HAT+ similtaneously the Raspberry Pi 5 itself, making use of the primary end-user accessible PCI Categorical lane on a mainstream Raspberry Pi mannequin to supply high-speed high-capacity storage. Whereas the Raspberry Pi 5 launched late final yr, although, the M.2 HAT+ has taken a bit longer to prepare — and, consequently, has been crushed to market by options from firms together with the corporate previously often known as Pineberry Pi, Pimoroni, SupTronics, 52Pi, and Waveshare.

Even with the Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ out, the third-party options supply an added bonus over the official design: help for PCI Categorical Gen. 3, in comparison with a Gen. 2 restrict on the official board. Whereas this runs the Raspberry Pi 5’s PCI Categorical lane exterior its formally rated spec, it roughly doubles the throughput doable — taking it from the roughly 500MB/s doable on the official board to round 1GB/s.

“Whereas in a great world we’d have launched the M.2 HAT+ similtaneously Raspberry Pi 5, it was essential to not rush issues,” Adams says of the board’s late launch. “There have been nonetheless just a few unresolved questions, notably across the two ‘spare’ pins on the 16-pin FFC [Flat Flexible Circuit] connector. Whereas these pins carried I2C indicators in our earliest prototypes, in the long run the Raspberry Pi PCIe Connector specification allocates them to fastened features: one as an influence allow for downstream machine energy, and one as a board detect and wake sign.”

“And we wished to make it possible for our product actually was a HAT+,” Adams continues, “which in flip meant we needed to resolve just a few final wrinkles within the Raspberry Pi HAT+ specification. Raspberry Pi specs, like our 40-pin GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output] connector and our three-pin debug connector, usually turn out to be de facto requirements for the remainder of the trade, and we now have a duty to get them proper first time.”

The corporate hasn’t simply been engaged on the {hardware}, both: a firmware pull request merged this week provides preliminary help for utilizing an M.2 NVMe drive as a boot machine when it sits behind a PCI Categorical swap — as with third-party HATs that help two or extra drives, or a single drive alongside one other PCIe machine like a community card or AI accelerator.

The Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ is offered from all Raspberry Pi resellers now at $12, and helps M.2 M-key 2230 and 2242 drives. Extra data, together with schematics to be used as a reference design in constructing your individual Raspberry Pi 5 PCIe HAT+ units, is offered on the Raspberry Pi web site.