Thanks for your guide.
If you have problemas try next things
1- Change your HDD adapter USB cable to the other USB port on RPI5
2- Use RPI5 power supply, RPI4 official PSU didnt work on my RPI5 on Umbrel migration
This is slightly off-topic (and a bit late…)
Yes, RiPi’s do support NVMe as primary boot / Storage devices.
You may need to jump through some hoop’s first, in order to get it to work first time.
I am just going through a similar issue myself with a bunch of RiPi 5’s 8GB I picked up with mixed capacity NVMe sizes (500GB > 2TB) and trying to provision them as boot drives for a couple of projects I have going on, incl. Migrating my UmbrelOS from my old Pi4 8GB (2.5" SATA SSD) > Pi5-8GB (2TB NVMe. SSD)
I am running a few of the Geekworm PoE + NVMe SSD shield HATs (Geekworm x1012 ver 1.2) with 2TB NVMe in Gen3 (8Gb/s) mode
After a little digging before purchase from what I gather there was an initial issue with RiPi5’s NVMe SSD support, lack thereof.
Some NVMe’s which had the Phision controllers were apparently not playing very well, meaning they would not boot or even act as storage drives (or only as storage and not as boot) - This has been mostly rectified and now after firmware eprom update, better nvme storage controller support is available/supported
The fix is to update the Pi5 firmware/eprom and also add some boot config commands found inside: …/boot/firmware/config.txt file.
[Caution]
- open a Terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T)
- run
sudo raspi-configand choose ‘Latest’ under Advanced Options > Bootloader Version.
Running sudo rpi-eeprom-update in the Terminal will tell you which version of firmware is running.
in order to get the Pi5 to boot and run at pcie1_gen 2 or pcie1_gen 3 speeds (Drive dependent) you must check this otherwise you could possibly brick or damage your RiPi before modifying the ./boot/firmware/config.txt
# Add to bottom of /boot/firmware/config.txt
dtparam=pciex1
# Note: You could also just add the following (it is an alias to the above line)
# dtparam=nvme
# Optionally, you can control the PCIe lane speed using this parameter
# dtparam=pciex1_gen=3
Also you need to consider the Boot order
Anyway, Please take this with a pinch of salt and don’t use verbatim, rather as a general guide on getting up and running with a Pi5 + NVMe…
Here you will find a list of tested (but not Certified) nvme drives which have proven to work with ripi’s 5 - See Pimoni NVMe drive compatibility list & setup guide:
Another link from the Pimoroni site “Getting Started with NVMe Base for Raspberry Pi 5”
Getting Started with NVMe Base.
A Jeff Geerling’s useful setup guide can be found here…
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/nvme-ssd-boot-raspberry-pi-5
Specifically, for Geekworm products (however, contains helpful information/comments on RiPi5 & NVMe)
https://wiki.geekworm.com/NVMe_SSD_boot_with_the_Raspberry_Pi_5
I know its been a good few months since your original comment… I hope this helps others…
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thanks a lot for this clear description! Just finished the update under the Christmas tree. It is all fine and working as usual. And btw. you realized my Linux dream! Simple user friendly no terminal is needed. Just start and see what you want to do.
So … These steps do not say to “insert the microSD into the Pi 5” - is this intentional? I am assuming we are supposed to put the microSD into the Pi 5 before we boot it up, but this results in the “Setup Umbrel” page being displayed.
I have succesfuly migrated from rpi4 to rpi5 with my old SSD. Last step is change the boot from mSD to my SATA SSD. Is there an easy way to install Umbrel boot to my SSD, without having to format my SSD?