The Raspberry Pi 5's new PCIe interface is spawning all manner of new add-ons, the latest of which is the $55 Geekworm X1011 NVMe board with support for up to four NVMe SSDs. This should be great for bulk storage, but you can't -- at least currently -- boot off of these drives.
The Geekworm X1011 is understandably larger than Pimoroni's NVMe Base and Pineboards (formerly Pineberry Pi) Hat Drive. It has to be to accommodate four M.2 NVMe SSDs from 2230 to 2280 in size. The larger size also means it has to be located underneath the Raspberry Pi 5. The extra space to the side can be used with the best Raspberry Pi HATs.
The PCIe 2.0 interface provides a reported 5 Gbps of data transfer, how much of that the Raspberry Pi 5 can handle remains to be seen. Power is provided by either an external 5V wall wart, or (and we can't stress this enough) via pogo pins on the Raspberry Pi 5 itself. The two power sources cannot be used at once; that would most likely kill your Raspberry Pi 5.
Intrepid PCIe investigator and YouTuber Jeff Geerling is already hands on with a test unit (ours is on the way) and he has noted a few things already. Geerling spotted that the PCIe Flat Flexible Cable (FFC, sometimes called "flatflex") is of a similar design to Pimoroni's NVMe Base. The S-shaped FFC means that there is space for users to insert a micro SD card, and that is something that you will need. Right now you will need to boot from micro SD, booting from NVMe with multiple drives is currently not supported. A future firmware change may make this a possibility, but that is just a hope for now.
As Geerling correctly notes, the Raspberry Pi 5 only exposes one lane of PCIe Gen 2, so a switch chip is necessary to create the multiple connections — it is also why we can't boot from NVMe. The ASM1184e is a PCIe Gen 2 switch, and that limits the interface to Gen 2 speeds, the officially supported speed for the Raspberry Pi 5 (although you can easily tweak this for Gen 3 speeds, but not with the X1011.)
The problem that Geerling has spotted is that the Gen 2 interface is shared across up to four devices, and that means you won't be getting the best throughput, Geerling calculates that the throughput could only be 430 MB/s.
We'll wait for our review unit to arrive before passing judgment. We've also got Pimoroni's new NVMe Base Duo in the review queue. As you can guess from the name, this provides space for two M.2 NVMe SSDs and it too suffers from the same Gen 2 throughput issue.
The Geekworm X1011 retails for $55 and there is currently a $4 discount when purchased directly from Geekworm.
