With the Raspberry Pi 5‘s exposed PCI Express connector comes many new possibilities. Jeff Geerling tests the Geekwork X1011, which puts four NVMe SSDs under a Raspberry Pi 5.
Unlike the Penta SATA HAT I tested last month, this carrier uses thinner and faster NVMe storage, making it a highly-compact storage expansion option, which has the added benefit of freeing up the top of the Pi 5 for other HAT expansion options.
But how does the board get power from the Pi 5? Raspberry Pi maintains you shouldn’t draw more than 5W through the PCIe FFC, so where does the board get up to 5A 5V power? It’s through pogo pins.
Because the Pi 5 only exposes one lane (x1) of PCI Express Gen 2, you need a PCI Express switch chip (much like a network switch) to split that single lane into four connections.
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