You can now turn your Raspberry Pi 5 into a true retro gaming PC with official hardware, as the manufacturer has just released its own PCIe 3.0 SSDs

What surprised me most about the Raspberry Pi 5 when it launched in 2023 was that it supports PCIe drives. When I found out about this, the first thing that came to mind was of course the possibility of turning it into a real desktop PC with gaming functionality.

Unfortunately, there were no official PCIe SSD solutions for the Raspberry Pi at release, and although the company eventually released its own M.2 HAT+ (HAT means “hardware attached on top” and not something like “a real hat”) To enable SSD connectivity, you still had to go to a third party for the SSD. However, now Raspberry Pi Ltd has announced (via Tom’s Hardware) official SSDs and SSD kits that combine these with the M.2 HAT+.

When I decided to speed up my Raspberry Pi 5 earlier this year, I chose to use Pimoroni’s NVMe base to connect a Crucial P3. To connect an SSD, you’ll need to use a HAT like the Pimoroni Base – or the official Raspberry Pi – as the Pi 5 doesn’t have an M.2 port built into the board. It has a PCIe port to which you can connect a HAT using a ribbon cable. This allows many different PCIe devices to be used.

In my review of the Raspberry Pi 5, I pointed out that it is the first Raspberry Pi that is truly suitable as a desktop PC. Its performance improvements over the Pi 4 – especially when combined with an active cooler – allow it to handle most everyday desktop use cases.

I even tried gaming on it and was surprised that it could run Doom 3 at reasonably playable frame rates, albeit at a very low resolution. Nothing spectacular compared to real gaming PCs and handhelds, but pretty damn impressive for a tiny SBC.

The only problem was that I was running it from a microSD. Even fast MicroSDs do not offer outstanding loading times and certainly not data stability. What I needed was an SSD, which is why I chose the Pimoroni + Crucial P3 route.

But this was expensive (for a Raspberry Pi) and required making sure I picked exactly the right SSD since not everything plays well with the Pi. Although I’m now very happy with the Pimoroni + Crucial combination, if I had access to an official HAT and SSD solution like the kits that Raspberry Pi now offers, I would have chosen it in a heartbeat.

Note that the new Raspberry Pi SSDs are also PCIe 3.0 compatible, although the Pi 5 officially only supports PCIe 2.0. However, you can unlock 3.0 speeds by adding the Pi edding’s configuration file and “dtparam=pciex1_gen=3” below. It’s an easy way to overclock your Pi 5 + SSD setup.

Raspberry Pi says: “The entry-level 256GB drive costs $30 alone or $40 as a kit; its 512GB big brother costs $45 alone or $55 as a kit. Both densities provide at least 4KB random read and write performance of 40,000 IOPS and 70,000 IOPS, respectively.

While adding such an SSD to your Raspberry Pi 5 offers many other uses, gaming is certainly one of them. Heck, Jeff Geerling recently hooked up an external GPU for 4K gaming.

However, if I’m not using it to run Steam on the Raspberry Pi Linux OS, I’d be inclined to use the SSD to house a retro gaming OS like Retropie or Recalbox. Whatever gaming solution you choose, there’s now an officially licensed way to upgrade your Raspberry Pi 5 to make getting there even easier.

topicnews · October 23, 2024

You can now turn your Raspberry Pi 5 into a true retro gaming PC with official hardware, as the manufacturer has just released its own PCIe 3.0 SSDs

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