How to set-up and boot a Raspberry Pi from an NVMe SSD

Firmware

Make sure your Raspberry Pi 5 firmware is up to date with the 2023-12-06 or later version. A software update on the RPi OS should do this for you, but you can force it by running:

sudo rpi-eeprom-update 

in the Terminal. This will also tell you which firmware is running.

Power

The NVMe hat uses around 5W of power but worth monitoring power usage SSD so that you don't have any isues.

Set-up

List Block Devices - ususally wont show the NVMe device without it being configured.

lsblk

We need to edit the configuration files to access our NVMe SSD.

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

At the very end after [all] we add the lines:

[all]
dtparam=nvme
dtparam=pciex1_gen=2 

Gen 2 is supported but Gen 3 seems to be stable and Ctrl-X to save and exit, sudo reboot. Trying lsblk again and we can check to see if we can see the NVMe drive.

PCIe 3 Mode

To enable experimental and not-officially-supported PCIe 3 mode, add the follow line to the [all] section at the end of your Raspberry Pi /boot/config.txt file:

[all]
dtparam=pciex1_gen=3

Speed Testing

We can test the speed of the drive using the name of the ssd drive from the lsblk command:

sudo hdparm -t --direct /dev/nvme0n1

How to boot from the NVMe SSD

First of all fully update the pi and reboot:

sudo apt update 
sudo apt upgrade 
sudo reboot 

We can edit the EEPROM configuration files with:

sudo rpi-eeprom-config --edit

Change the BOOT_ORDER line to the following:

BOOT_ORDER=0xf416

The 6 represents the NVMe SSD drive. Then add the following line if using a non-HAT+ adapter:

PCIE_PROBE=1