• Officially from Raspberry Pi.
• NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) SSD, normally via PCIe bus. These are NOT SATA SSD
• 2230, mechanical size/dimension, please ensure the size fits the board
• M.2 M-Key, please make sure the M.2 socket is M-key compatible
• Pre-loaded with Raspberry Pi OS and is ready to boot up on
  • Raspberry Pi 5 (with the latest bootloader firmware and a PCIe to M.2 HAT. To update the bootloader, please refer to this tutorial)
  • Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (with the latest bootloader firmware)
  • Raspberry Pi 400
  • Compute Module 4 (CM4) with NVMe SSD carrier board.
• Please DO NOT format it if you intend to use it with the Raspberry Pi board.

With the PCIe extension on Raspberry Pi 5, Raspberry Pi has also decided to offer its own branded NVMe SSDs. The SSDs work on Raspberry Pi 5, booting into Raspberry Pi OS without any hassle. Of course, you can use it to boot up Raspberry Pi 4 with USB to NVMe adapter. With Compute Module 4 (CM4), the PCIe Gen2 bus is extended out on some carrier boards such as the CM4 Maker Board or Mini Base (A). Furthermore, the NVMe boot is also officially released by Raspberry Pi.  This is a native NVMe SSD boot via PCIe bus, it does not go through to any USB to NVMe adapter. Booting from NVMe SSD offers faster booting time, and faster application loading time too.

Do check out Jeff Geerling talking about CM4 boots off an NVMe SSD, natively in this video:

If you prefer to read the article, welcome to check out the blog by Jeff Gerling here: The Raspberry Pi can boot of NVMe SSDs now.

From Jeff’s benchmarking with eMMC, microSD card, and USB 3.0 (UASP) adapter, the native NMVe interface is 12x faster on the Pi for normal file operations that include: copies, and random read/write. And that also improves day-to-day performance.

Raspberry Pi SSDs offer excellent memory I/O performance of Raspberry Pi 5 via the PCIe bus:

If you have a CM4 carrier board with M.2 socket or USB to NVMe SSD Adapter and would like to get the SSD only, please ensure the M.2 socket is M-Key and supports 2230 size:

M.2 SSD Size by matob.web