Connect up to 4 M.2 NVMe SSDs to a Raspberry Pi 5 with the Geekwork X1011 board

A few months ago Geekworm launched one of the first boards that allows you to connect up to two M.2 2280 PCIe NVMe SSDs to a Raspberry Pi 5.

Now the company is back with another model that supports up to four. The Geekworm X1011 add-on board for the Raspberry Pi 5 is available now for $50 from the Geekworm AliExpress shop or $51 from the Geekworm website.

The Raspberry Pi 5 is the first of Raspberry Pi’s single-board computers with a PCIe interface. By default it’s configured to support PCIe 2.0 speeds (topping out at 5 GT/s), but it is possible to configure the Pi 5 to support PCIe 3.0 SSDs as well (up to 8 GT/s). Unfortunately, this board doesn’t support that feature, as its PCI Express chip is limited to Gen 2 speeds, which means you’re unlikely to see data transfer speeds higher than 430MB/s when using the X1011 add-on board.

Add-on boards like the Geekworm X1011 make it possible to use the little computer as a network-attached storage device, among other things.

There are a few things to keep in mind when looking at this board.

First, this board measures 109 x 87mm, making it larger than the 85mm x 56mm Raspberry Pi 5. That increases the footprint of the little computer, but even with the X1011 board, the Raspberry Pi 5 is smaller than most mini PCs.

Second, the board doesn’t currently support booting a Raspberry Pi 5 from an NVMe drive. That appears to be a firmware issue, so there’s a chance that it could change in the future, but for now you’ll need to use a different storage device as a boot drive.

And third, this board only supports NVMe SSDs and will not work with SATA drives. Geekworm also says “older NVMe drives with less efficient flash memory may not perform as well as newer drives.”

Geekworm says you can either power the board via a 5V power adapter or have it draw power from the Raspberry Pi 5 through a set of pogo pins. But you cannot use the 5V adapter while a USB-C power supply is plugged into the Raspberry Pi, so you’ll have to choose one power source or the other.

Of course, this isn’t the only option for adding storage to a Raspberry Pi 5. There are a bunch of boards that support one or two M.2 SSDs (Geekworm’s model has had a price cut and now sells for $33). In March Radxa launched a $45 Penta SATA HAT add-on board that lets you connect up to five SATA hard drives or SSDs. And Geekworm also has its own 5-port SATA Shield that sells for $57.

via Jeff Geerling and Tom’s Hardware