Raspberry Pi Launches an In-House 1TB M.2 2230 NVMe SSD for the Capacity-Hungry Raspberry Pi 5 User

Raspberry Pi has announced a new entry in its compact 2230-footprint M.2 solid-state drive (SSD) storage family, designed for use with the Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ adapter on a Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer, and this one goes up to a whole terabyte.

"How much data can a terabyte store? TL;DR: Loads. For example, you can save a quarter of a million photos, 200,000 songs (my first MP3 player held just 40… it got awfully repetitive), 250 HD movies, or 20–30 AAA games," writes Raspberry Pi's Ashley Whittaker in support of the company's latest hardware launch. "To facilitate your consumption of the aforementioned media, we decided you should have the option to purchase a 1TB capacity SSD from us."

The Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ breaks out the Raspberry Pi 5's custom flat flexible circuit (FFC) PCI Express connector to a standard M.2 M-key slot suitable for Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) drives — with the twist that it only accepts relatively compact 2230- and 2242-footprint modules, meaning a lot of the larger drives on the market simply won't fit. Back in October last year the company launched its first own-brand SSDs — 256GB at launch, 512GB later — which were a perfect fit, and now offers a 1TB model that once again doubles the maximum capacity available.

The new model is not only the largest capacity but also the highest-performance of the SSDs Raspberry Pi has launched so far, rated at 90k input/output operations per second (IOPS) for both 4kB-sized random reads and writes, up from 50k read and 90k write on the 512GB model and 40k read and 70k write on the 256GB model — though peak performance will require you to run your M.2 HAT+ out-of-spec, bumping it from its officially-rated PCI Express Gen. 2 to the faster PCI Express Gen. 3.

The Raspberry Pi 1TB SSD is now available from resellers, priced at $70; more information is available on the official product page.