General discussion • Re: What's with the M.2/NVMe obsession?

Requires additional hardware

An NVMe adaptor is the same cost and work as a USB enclosure and is faster.

More expensive (see above)

I have SSDs left over from upgrades. I do not have SD cards of that capacity. Therefore the NVMe storage is cheap.

Needs more power (yes, really)

USB chips in enclosures gobble power so the PCIe adaptor is, overall, using less power.

Fragile ribbon connector

The flat cable is inside the case. A USB cable is outside and exposed to dogs, children, and the worst creature of all, the one who dumps a shopping bag on top of everything.

Adding more than one needs additional hardware and splits bandwidth.

2280 handles 8 TB, which is 4 TB more than I need.

The Pi5 seems much more picky about NVMe drives than it does SD cards.

No problems with any of mine at PCIe 3 speed.

More hassle than SD/USB for swapping between OS as you can't just unplug one and plug in another. Yeah, I know it's possible but more steps and tools are involved. I also know there are ways to muck around with boot order and GPIO based conditional filters but I suspect most folks obsessed with NVMe won't have a clue about those.

There are other operating systems?

No more bandwidth over PCIe than there is over a USB 3 port (unless running at the uncertified gen3, which may or may not work for you)

Gen 3 works for me.

Sustained transfers (like streaming video) won't be any faster than from an HDD or SSD drive. Any decent SATA III device can saturate the USB 3 interface just as NVMe can saturate the PCIe one.

Try a mass convert of video from one format to another.

Network applications (like a DIY NAS) won't really benefit as the performance limit will be the network. And while I'm on the subject of DIY NAS, the huge additional expense of NVMe vs spinning rust once you go over ~1TB.

Pi 4 is for plates of steel. Pi 5 can run multiple functionality including the use of databases where it is worth spending a little extra for plates of silicon.

Then there's the big one: you'll never see the full rated performance of the vast majority of NVMe drives. Most are designed for 4 v4 PCIe lanes. There's a single v2 lane available.

If I did not have enough left over from previous projects, I would make use of the clearance discounts on older PCIe NVMe caused by PCIe 5, up to 40%.

Statistics: Posted by peterlite — Fri Jan 03, 2025 4:23 am

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