Boost Your Raspberry Pi’s Performance with the New $12 M.# Slot HAT+ Expansion Board

The Raspberry Pi 5 has a dedicated PCIe connector, giving you another way to plug in more boards and accessories without USB. Raspberry Pi has now released the M.2 HAT+ board, which uses the PCIe bus to give your Pi 5 an M.2 expansion slot.

There were already a few third-party devices for adding an M.2 slot to a Raspberry Pi 5 , such as the Mcuzone MPS2280 , but now Raspberry Pi has released its own version for $12. It connects to the single-lane PCI Express 2.0 bus on the Raspberry Pi 5 board, giving you a standard M.2 slot that can be used for NVMe drives, AI accelerators, and other cards.

Raspberry Pi said in a blog post, “When we launched Raspberry Pi 5 we also showed off a prototype HAT+, which bridged between our FFC connector and the standard M.2 M-key form factor used by NVMe drives and many other small PCIe devices. After several revisions, simplifications, and a whole lot of testing, that prototype became the product you see today.”

The Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ supports devices with the M.2 M key edge connector, in both 2230 and 2242 form factors and a power supply of up to 3A. The company is promising transfer speeds of up to 500 MB/s, which isn’t anywhere near as fast as you’d get from an NVMe drive in most standard PCs. That’s still a lot faster than most SD cards, though, and it’s a great way to add more storage without taking up USB ports. You should be able to boot the operating system from an NVMe drive as well.

Raspberry Pi mentioned the HAT+ board was tested with “a wide variety of NVMe drives and other peripherals,” and delays in testing and development are partly why the HAT+ board wasn’t available at the Pi 5’s launch. Still, better late than never, and $12 seems like a decent price for expanding the Pi’s connectivity options.

You can buy the Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ now from Raspberry Pi’s approved resellers. Keep in mind that it’s only compatible with the latest Raspberry Pi 5 model—earlier boards and the Pi Zero lineup do not have the required PCI Express connector.

Source: Raspberry Pi

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