Geekworm X1004 PCIe to Dual M.2 HAT NVMe 2280 SSD PCIe Peripheral Board for Raspberry Pi 5 16GB/8GB/4GB/2GB

This hat is a great addition to the Raspberry Pi. I am able to boot my Ubuntu 20.04 from the SSD without having a SD card inserted. You just need to write the image directly to the SSD. I wanted to use the Raspberry Pi as a file server to share large file with friends.

Works right out of the box. Compact and fits in the geekpi rpi5 metal case (a bit tight but works w/ both NVMe drives on top). The same fan cooler that comes with the geekpi rpi5 metal case also fits between this HAT and the pi itself. Also works out of the box with one of the NVMe drives being the boot drive! I used the RPi Imager (version 1.9.6) to write PiOS onto my NVMe drive using a USB adapter, slotted the drive into the slot marked as "nvme 1" and things immediately booted up, no SD card needed. `lsblk` also showed that the second NVMe drive that I slotted in is being recognized (just have to tweak fstab at this point). * disclaimer: only thing I have not tested is the IO speed bc I'm not doing anything that requires production-levels of IO

I wish that I had not bought this hat as it will not add/retrieve information and is only used as a storage unit. Because of this, I have only given it 4 stars. I do wish that in the video it would have explained how to hook up the cable instead of just having music playing.

It just works....I can't say much more that. I highly recommend trying this out. I've got two of these, and one of them is just one NVMe and waiting for an AI acclerator. The other is running with a mini-nas with dual NVMe 4TB each. It's extremely easy to utilize, just plug and play and it's the exact same as if it was a regular computer's PCIe slot.

This thing looks great but I lost the ribbon cable. I do know what one to buy to replace it. Mike

The instructions were very basic and didn't explain which of the two included ribbon cables to install (or why there's two cables included that look different and only a place for one cable and only one cable in the install instructions) nor did it provide any instructions on how to actually install said ribbon cable. it was very very difficult to slot the hat into the GPIO connector and i was seriously concerned i was going to snap the hat in half trying to push it into the GPIO connector. With the hat pressed all the way down (as far as I could without literally getting out a hammer) into the GPIO connector there was a 4-5mm gap between the bottom of the GPIO adapter and the Pi5 device. The "instructions" image shows no gap whatsoever. The smallest riser I have is snug to the Pi5 and the nvme hat so it doesn't appear there's enough room to have it flush down like shown in the picture. This "hobby" of tiny computing seems to be difficult to get into due to the high difficulty level of building and configuring everything, and manufacturers of these products aren't making it any more consumer friendly by having sub-par instructions and lack of insight when it comes to the installation processes.

This item has worked well for me

It very good it's just that I wish I could mount some where else