At the beginning of December we talked about the Raspberry Pi 500, and what is probably its only weak point: the lack of an M.2 slot to install high-speed NVMe drives. Leaving aside the SD card has its benefits, and as expected, some enthusiasts online began exploring the possibility of building the circuit to enable its function. In less than a week the first hack has appeared, and although it is not a process suitable for beginners, it is not the end of the world either...
At the launch of the fifth version of its mini computer and the Compute Module 5, Raspberry Pi told us that both products were between two and three times faster than their predecessors thanks to the new integrated silicon. Obviously, this was repeated with the Raspberry Pi 500, but a discovery on its PCB caused much confusion: the lack of M.2 support to install NVMe drives.
Users immediately complained: What is the point of optimizing its specifications if it remains "castrated" with the speed of an SD card? The official response has been clear: the Raspberry Pi 500 will not receive M.2 support in the near future. Now, what about unofficial support? Let's say there has been progress in the last few days...
Raspberry Pi 500 with NVMe
The first news came from both X/Twitter and Jeff Geerling's blog. To begin, it is necessary to install four capacitors on the PCIe lines (not so simple considering their size), and add the M.2 socket, another important challenge because it is made of plastic.
You also need to configure the config.txt file on the Raspberry Pi 500 to enable PCI Express, and this works both in Gen2 and Gen3 mode, always at x1. The last step is to inject 3.3 volts in the right place. For the first experiments they used external sources, but the ideal is to install a DC/DC converter with the ENABLE function (that allows the NVMe to shut down correctly with the Pi 500). Samuel Hedrick on X/Twitter has already done this with an AP3441SHE-7B (the same regulator used in the Compute Module 5), and in his images we can see that the final hack is quite clean, without extreme modifications.
I imagine that in the coming days the precise list of components will appear, and that leads us to a last conclusion: we don't understand why Raspberry Pi didn't include M.2 support from the factory. If the cost argument doesn't hold (the AP3441SHE-7B costs 18 cents in packs of 1,000), the most likely thing is that there was a validation problem, but we would like to know more about it.
Sources: Hackaday, Jeff Geerling, Samuel Hedrick on X/Twitter.
