Overview

Description

The ZP512 board is an M.2 Key-M NVMe SSD PIP PCIe Peripheral Board for the Raspberry Pi 5 that uses the new PCIE interface of the Raspberry Pi 5 to utilize the M.2 NVME SSDs for ultra-fast booting and fast data transmission.

 

Features

• ZDE ZP512 M.2 NVMe to PCIe Adapter Board is specially designed to use with official Raspberry Pi 5 active cooler. Special hole slots design of the cooling fan matches with the board for easy installation.

• Supports the installation of M.2 KEY-M NVMe SSD in 2230/2242 length.

• Compact design, leaving more space to cool the Raspberry Pi 5 and SSD for better heat dissipation effect.

• ZP512 PCIe Peripheral Board is only compatible with Raspberry Pi 5 8GB / 4GB (NOT include Raspberry Pi 5).

• The ZP512 hardware has no limit on NVMe SSD capacity, which depends on the Raspberry Pi OS.

 

 

Installation Guide

Installation of M.2 NVMe SSD

• Install 2242 SSD

• Easy to install 2230 SSD

 

 

Installation of PCIe FPC Cable

Pay attention to the direction of the cable and connect it as shown in the figure:

 

 

Packing List

 

 

How to Use

Find your PCI device

List PCI device command. If your NVME SSD device is connected successfully, then your NVME SSD device is as follows:

$ lspci

 

Enable PCIe

To enable the connector, add the following line to /boot/firmware/config.txt:

$sudo nano /boot/firmware/config.txt

add the following line

dtparam=pciex1

dtparam=nvme

Reboot with sudo reboot for the configuration changes to take effect.

Note: You can also use the alias nvme.

 

Boot from PCIe

By default, Raspberry Pi devices do not boot from PCIe storage. To enable boot from PCIe, change the BOOT_ORDER in the bootloader configuration. Edit the EEPROM configuration with the following command:

$ sudo rpi-eeprom-config --edit

Replace the BOOT_ORDER line with the following line:

BOOT_ORDER=0xf416

To boot from a non-HAT+ device, also add the following line:

PCIE_PROBE=1

After saving your changes, reboot your Raspberry Pi with sudo reboot to update the EEPROM.

 

PCIe Gen 3.0

Warning

The Raspberry Pi 5 is not certified for Gen 3.0 speeds. PCIe Gen 3.0 connections may be unstable.

The connection is certified for Gen 2.0 speeds (5 GT/sec), but you can force Gen 3.0 (10 GT/sec) speeds. To enable PCIe Gen 3.0 speeds, add the following line to /boot/firmware/config.txt:

dtparam=pciex1_gen=3

Reboot your Raspberry Pi with sudo reboot for these settings to take effect.

 

Write Speed Test

dd command can be used to test write speed.

The following command will write into a 2000MB file named “test” to disk:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=./test bs=10M count=200

 

 

SSD Compatibility

Only for SSDs with M.2 KEY interface NVMe protocol.

Currently there are quite a few customers give feedback on SSD compatibility. We have done a lot of tests about the problem and the solutions are as follows:

1. Upgrade your system to the latest:

$ sudo apt update

$ sudo apt upgrade

$ sudo rpi-eeprom-update

 

Restart

 

Check the current bootloader version with the following command:

$ vcgencmd bootloader_version

2024/06/05 16:41:49

version 6fe0b091c7cb1c5da26b7f41cc24c42840531a83 (release)

timestamp 1717602109

update-time 1720508793

capabilities 0x0000007f

 

2. Replace the SSD with another model and use it again.

 

3. Our SSD adapter board is just a PCIe adapter circuit that doesn't affect SSD compatibility, and the SSD compatibility depends on the Raspberry Pi 5 motherboard. We have tested several Raspberry Pi 5 motherboards, finding that under the same test environment, one Raspberry Pi 5 motherboard can recognize all kinds of SSDs and has good compatibility; however, other Raspberry Pi 5 motherboards’ compatibility are not so good, which can only recognize some SSDs. Therefore, replace the Raspberry Pi 5 motherboard with other batches is also a good solution.

 

 

Support

If you have any question or need technical support, please contact: [email protected].