CEO Eben Upton explains in a new blog post that the Raspberry Pi Foundation has the first SSD kits ready for purchase. It's not all-new hardware, though. The kits are bundles consisting of a 2230 format M.2 SSD along with the existing M.2 HAT+ add-on.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a new official storage product for the Raspberry Pi 5. The new NVMe SSD comes in 256GB and 512GB capacities, though the larger won't be available until November.

Raspberry Pi introduces NVMe SSDs and SSD Kits, boosting performance for I/O-intensive tasks on Raspberry Pi 5 and beyond.

Note that the new Raspberry Pi SSDs are PCIe 3.0 compatible, too, even though the Pi 5 only officially 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 a simple way to overclock your Pi 5 + SSD setup.

In terms of performance, Raspberry Pi claims that the 256GB NVMe drive offers 40,000 IOPS for 4kB random reads and 70,000 IOPS for 4kB random writes, while the 512GB model is said to deliver 50,000 IOPS for 4kB random reads and 90,000 IOPS for 4kB random writes.

You can now get a 256GB or 512GB drive with official Raspberry Pi branding, and even bundle it with a HAT+ module.

Following hot on the heels of the recent branded A2 micro SD cards, Raspberry Pi are working with Biwin to produce branded 256GB and 512GB NVMe SSDs.

Raspberry Pi now sells SSD storage and SSD kits for its Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers (SBCs) in 256 and 512 GB configurations.