Testing Cytron MAKERDISK M.2 NVMe SSDs on Raspberry Pi 5 with GEEKWORM X1001 and Waveshare M.2 PCIe HAT+

Cytron has sent us a few of their MAKERDISK NVMe SSDs preloaded with Raspberry Pi OS so that we can test them on a Raspberry Pi 5 SBC, either with a GEEKWORM X1001 or Waveshare M.2 PCIe HAT+ add-on boards both of which were also provided by the company.

Ever since the first M.2 PCIe HATs for the Raspberry Pi 5 were released, we knew Raspberry Pi Limited was working on its own model, and based on some Twitter/X “rumors” (with photos) the launch of the official M.2 HAT+ should be just around the corner. So it’s the perfect timing to test some SSDs on the Raspberry Pi 5 even though I’ve yet to get the official HAT+

Cytron “MAKERDISK” package unboxing

The Malaysian company sent me a kit with everything I needed to get started, minus the Raspberry Pi 5 I already owned.

This includes 128GB or 256GB NVMe 2242 M-Key SSDs, 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB 2280 M-Key SSDs, the GEEKWORM X1001 HAT kit, and the Waveshare M.2 PCIe HAT+ kit.

The 128 GB  2240 M.2 SSD is rated 1700MB/s (read) and 600 MB/s (write), while the 256 GB can achieve up to 2250MB/s read and 1040MB/s write speeds.

The read and write speeds for the M.2 2280 SSDs are as follows:

• 128GB – 1,800 MB/s, 560 MB/s
• 256GB – 2,050 MB/s, 1,000 MB/s
• 512GB – 2,050 MB/s, 1,700MB/s

Since we’ll be connecting those to the PCIe Gen2 x1 or PCIe Gen3 x1 interface of the Raspberry Pi 5, those speeds won’t matter that much as the PCIe interface will be the bottleneck

Waveshare’s PCIe to M.2 HAT+ board comes with a 40mm 16-pin PCIe FPC cable, a 40-pin female to male header, and some screws and standoffs, plus bits for people wanting to use a shorter 2230 SSD.  You’ll find the hardware and software documentation in the Wiki.

The more compact GEEKWORM X1001 board is more versatile as it can support 2230, 2242, 2260, and 2280 SSDs. The included PCIe FPC does not quite seem up to specs (but it does the job), and the package also comes with assembly instructions and a small bag with standoffs and screws. Again you’ll find the documentation on the company’s website.

HAT and SSD assembly with Raspberry Pi 5

I started with the assembly of the Waveshare PCIe to M.2 HAT+ without reading the documentation. It turns out it was not such a good idea.

I initially installed the female-to-male header to the Raspberry Pi 5 which makes it really difficult to install the HAT especially since the pins on the header were not perfectly aligned. So I had to remove it, and instead insert it to the HAT before connecting it to the Pi. Installing the M.2 SSD was straightforward.

When installing the flat cable we must make sure that the black ends are oriented properly, and after assembly was complete it looks as shown below.

But that’s actually wrong, as users also have to make sure the white arrow is installed close to the PWR LED as shown below.

So I had to flip the cable as shown above and the SSD could be detected.

The GEEKWORM X1001 is much easier to install. Insert the SSD and the flat cable as shown below.

Finally install the three standoffs (note they are slightly higher than the ones provided for the Waveshare HAT),  secure the board with three screws, and insert the other end of the cable to the PCIe connector on the Raspberry Pi 5.

It’s also much easier to remove than the Waveshare HAT+…

Booting Raspberry Pi OS from MAKERDISK SSD

One advantage of MAKERDISK M.2 NVMe SSD is that they are preloaded with Raspberry Pi OS, so you can just connect the drive, and Raspberry Pi OS will automatically boot without having to configure anything. That’s the theory at least, as it did not work once it met CNX Software’s test environment…

That board was sent to us by Raspberry Pi Limited right after the Pi 5 was announced, and it had been a while since I had not used it, let alone upgraded it. So I thought the firmware might have been too old.

So I booted the board with a microSD card, and checked the firmware version.

then upgraded the system and firmware with a full upgrade:

The firmware should now be the latest:

I took the opportunity to check the 128GB M.2 NVMe SSD was detected, and it was:

But after shutting down the Raspberry Pi 5, and removing the microSD card, the boot would still not complete with the system unable to find any bootable device. So I contacted Cytron, and they told me they already had tested it with several Raspberry Pi 5 boards and it worked out of the box without having to set up anything.

The Raspberry Pi documentation is pretty much garbage since it’s unnecessarily made complicated, but I found a solution in the aforelinked Waveshare wiki that clearly explains we can enable SSD Boot mode by changing the BOOT_ORDER value to 0xf416 (it was set to 0xf41):

I could finally boot the system from the SSD, and go through the setup wizard to configure the language, set up a username and password, and let the system automatically update itself to the latest version. The command below shows the rootfs is in an NVMe device:

I guess that means if you have recently purchased a Raspberry Pi 5 SBC, it should work just fine without doing anything, but if you’ve got an older board, you may need to update the EEPROM config like I did above.

MAKERDISK NVMe SSD performance testing

We’ll need to compile iozone from source since iozone3 is not available as a package:

I started testing the 2280 SSDs using SupTronics/GEEKWORK X1001 HAT.

M.2 2280 SSD 128GB:

That’s 434 MB/s read speed and 395 MB/s write speed in PCIe Gen2 mode.

Let’s switch to the “not-certified-to-work” PCIe Gen3 mode by adding the following line to /boot/firmware/config.txt before the [cm4] section:

and reboot the system.

It’s indeed faster than before

855 MB/s and 761 MB/s sequential read/write speeds respectively. It’s quite far from the theoretical performance of the SSD itself, but that’s the best the Raspberry Pi 5 can do.

We can check the link speed with the command lspci:

We can also double-check the PCIe link speed by looking at the kernel log:

If I revert to PCIe Gen2, the log looks like this:

Here are the results for the 256 GB M.2 2280 SSD

PCIe Gen2:

PCIe Gen3:

… and for the 512 GB M.2 2280 SSD

PCIe Gen2:

PCIe Gen3:

Since the Raspberry Pi 5 is the bottleneck here, I also installed the 512GB M.2 2280 NVMe SSD in the Rockchip RK3588-powered Radxa Rock 5B with a faster PCIe Gen 3 x4 interface.

It’s properly detected along with the eMMC flash that boots the OS:

iozone3 results:

The read performance is much better (1.74GB/s), but something is odd about the write performance (213 MB/s), and running iozone3 twice yields the same results. Random I/Os are also a bit slower. Maybe some settings need to be adjusted to extract more performance.

The table below summarizes the results for the M.2 2280 SSDs.

Let’s now switch the 2242 SSDs using the Waveshare HAT+ board, starting with the 128GB SSD

PCIe Gen2:

PCIe Gen3:

256GB 2242 SSD results

PCIe Gen2:

PCIe Gen3:

The 128GB and 256GB SSDs have about the same results due to the Raspberry Pi 5 PCIe interface being the bottleneck.

Raspberry Pi 5 temperature with GEEKWORM/Waveshare HATs.

Both HATs can be installed on top of the Raspberry Pi 5 active cooler, but they do block the airflow to some extent, especially the Waveshare PCIe to M.2 HAT+, so I’ve decided to check the temperature while running a stress test on the CPU and SSD.

256GB SSD temperature test with Waveshare HAT+

I ran the following two commands at the same time…

… and monitored the CPU temperature with the RPI-monitor program.

The maximum was around 67-69C. You’ll also find a thermal image taken with the Xtherm II TS2+ thermal imager for smartphones below. It shows the SSD’s highest temperature is 52.9°C after several minutes.

256GB SSD temperature with GEEKWORM X1001 HAT

I repeated the same test with the GEEKWORM X1001, but first I had to install 256GB M.2 2240 SSD. The FAQ in the aforelinked wiki explains:

How to fix the 2230/2242/2260 SSD?
A: The X1000 does not reserve the nut column to fix the 2230/2242/2260 SSD. Based on our test, you can secure the 2230/2242/2260 SSD using an M2*6mm screw and 2pcs M2 nuts. Place one M2 nut under the SSD, then use the M2*6mm screw and the other M2 nut to fasten the SSD.

That’s nice, but I don’t happen to have spare M.2 nuts with me, so instead I use the adapters and screws from the Waveshare kit, and it did the job.

Then I went ahead and ran the same stress and iozone commands.

The temperature was around 65-67°C. It’s cooler, but not significantly so. What’s good is that CPU throttling does not happen at all with either HAT and the active cooler does its job even when covered by a HAT. All tests were done in a room with an ambient temperature of around 30-32°C as my undersized air conditioner struggled to keep the room cool with an outdoor temperature of around 42°C… Here’s the thermal image with the GEEKWORM X1001 and the 256GB M.2 2242 SSD which shows the SSD is quite warmer at 63.4°C.

Conclusion

Cytron MAKERDISK M.2 NVMe SSDs work fine with the Raspberry Pi 5 using either GEEKWORM X1001 or Waveshare PCIE to M.2 HAT+ in PCIe Gen2 x1 (5GT/s) or PCIe Gen3 x1 (8GT/s)  modes. The performance is about the same for all models since the Raspberry Pi 5’s PCIe interface is the bottleneck here even when configured as PCIe 3.0 x1.

The MAKERDISK NVMe SSDs are really convenient as they come pre-loaded with Raspberry Pi OS, so it will be a plug-and-play experience for most people. It was not quite the case for my board, probably because I got an early sample of the Raspberry Pi 5, and the EEPROM was not configured to boot NVMe by default, even after I upgraded the firmware.

Cytron is selling the M.2 NVMe 2280 M-Key MAKERDISK SSD for $37.25 to $81 depending on the selected capacity, and the M.2 NVMe 2242 MAKERDISK SSD for $32.50 (256GB). All come pre-loaded with a recent version of Raspberry Pi OS. Both HAT tested in the review can also be bought on Cytron, and alternatively, you’ll also find the GEEKWORM X1001 on Amazon ($15), and the Waveshare PCIe to M.2 HAT+ on Amazon ($14.60) or Aliexpress ($15.65).

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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