The manufacturer has just released its PCIe 3.0 Solid State Drives, which will allow you to turn your Raspberry Pi 5 in a retro gaming PC.

When the Raspberry Pi 5 was launched in 2023, I was surprised to learn that it supported PCIe drives. The first thing that came into my mind when I learned this was the ability to turn it into a desktop PC capable for gaming.

There were no official Raspberry Pi PCIe SSDs when the device was released. The company did release its own M.2 (HAT, which stands for Hardware Attached On Top) HAT+ to allow SSD connectivity. However, you had to purchase the SSD from a third-party. Tom's Hardware has now announced official SSDs, and SSD kits, that combine the M.2HAT+ with these SSDs.

When I decided to upgrade my Raspberry Pi 5 earlier this year, I chose to use the Pimoroni NVMe base to connect a Crucial P3. You'll need a HAT, such as the Pimoroni Base or the official Raspberry Pi HAT, to connect an SSD because the Pi 5 does not have an M.2 connector. It has a PCIe port that can be connected to with a ribbon cable. This allows you to use many different PCIe devices.

In my review of Raspberry Pi 5, I noted that it was the first Raspberry Pi that could be used as a desktop computer. Its performance improvements over the Pi 4 -- especially when combined with an Active Cooler -- make it able handle most everyday desktop uses.

I tried gaming on it, and was surprised that it could run Doom 3 with playable framerates. It's not as impressive as, say, a gaming PC or handheld, but it's still pretty impressive for a small SBC.

The only problem I had was that I was using a MicroSD. Even fast MicroSDs won't offer stellar loading times and they won't offer data stability. What I really needed was an SSD. That's why I chose the Pimoroni P3 and Crucial P3.

This was expensive for a Raspberry Pi and I had to make sure I chose the right SSD because not all work well with the Pi. Although I am very happy with my Pimoroni + Crucial combination, if I had been able to access an official HAT + SSD solution, like the kits Raspberry Pi now offers, I would have chosen that in a second.

The new Raspberry Pi SSDs support PCIe 3.0, even though the Pi 5 officially only supports PCIe 2.0. You can unlock 3.0 speeds, however, by edding the Pi's config file and adding "dtparam=pciex1_gen=3" to the bottom. It's easy to overclock the Pi 5 + SSD combination.

Raspberry Pi states that the entry-level 256GB hard drive is priced at $30, or $40 if purchased as a complete kit. Its 512GB big bro is priced at $55 if purchased as a complete kit, or $45 if purchased separately. Both densities provide minimum 4KB random write and read performance of 40k and 70k respectively.

Gaming is one of the many uses of an SSD. Jeff Geerling hooked up a 4K external GPU to a Raspberry Pi 5 recently.

I would use the SSD if it wasn't for running Steam on Raspberry Pi Linux OS. I would also consider using the SSD to store a retro gaming OS like Retropie or Recalbox. There's a way to upgrade your Raspberry Pi 5, which is officially licensed, to make it easier to get there.