A Little Light Soldering Brings NVMe To The Raspberry Pi 500
So you’re mad that the new Raspberry Pi 500 could have an NVMe drive, but doesn’t thanks to their decision to keep the price of the new system low? Well, with a handful of parts and some soldering you can fix that omission and move off the SD card! A wonderful person by the name of Samuel Hedrick has pulled it off and is currently working on publishing a full list of the parts you will need as well as how to add them.
The simple part seems to be adding an M.2 port to the space where it could have come installed on the Raspberry Pi 500, but that is only the first step. There is no power being sent to the M.2 port, which makes sense as you don’t want a random solder point outputting 3.3V; this could definitely cause bad things to happen. However, there are four PCIe coupling capacitors on the top of the board you can add and if you feed them 3.3V from a power supply you will have a working M.2 port to add an NVMe drive to. The trick is to use the included circuits on the Raspberry Pi 500 to power the M.2 internally, and those are the instructions we are awaiting.
The BOM needed to enable M.2, and PoE+ as well, is quite inexpensive which is leading to questions about just how much the cost would have increased if it had come already installed. Keep an eye for updates if you want to vastly increase the speed your Raspberry Pi 5 can run at.