A Cheap Upgrade for Your Raspberry Pi 5
Waveshare's $10 PCIe to M.2 adapter for the Raspberry Pi 5 adds full-size HDMI ports and an NVMe SSD slot for daily driving.
If you are looking for a simple and inexpensive way to turn your Raspberry Pi 5 into a more practical computer for daily use, then Waveshare’s new PCIe To M.2 Multifunctional Adapter might be just what you’re looking for. For ten bucks, this little board gets rid of two of the Pi’s most annoying quirks.
First, the adapter turns the tiny onboard micro HDMI ports into a pair of glorious, full-sized HDMI ports. No more searching for adapters, and no more cable management nightmares — just good old HDMI cables. Sometimes the little things do make a big difference.
Perhaps more importantly, the board provides easy access to an M.2 slot. It supports PCIe NVMe SSDs and other M.2 add-ons. With this, adding an SSD to the Pi is as easy as can be. And that means you can boot from a real disk, rather than an SD card. If you are going to be using your Pi as a daily driver, this is hardly optional. Under heavy use, that SD card would be spitting out errors in no time.
The board sits alongside the Pi, connected to its micro HDMI and USB-C ports. The 16-pin PCIe port is also connected to the board via a flat ribbon cable. Power can be supplied either via USB-C, or via screw terminals.
Check out the board’s product page for the rest of the details.