if you're anything like me you're a fan of computers you know we got laptops
like this we've got gaming computers but sometimes those are too big sometimes we
need computers that are a little bit smaller like the Raspberry Pi a
world-renowned small single board computer this this if you're not
familiar is a whole computer on a little board like this they're small they don't
draw very much power and they can be pretty powerful relative to the size but
there are some limitations first and foremost you see that right there that
is a Micro SD slot and that is the primary method of storage on this thing
and if you've ever played around with micro SD cards in pretty much any
capacity you probably know that they are prone to failure Andy how many SD cards
do you think have died in the the course of us working here I'll be tund really
yeah holy crap yeah finished lost oh losing them for sure but more
specifically the endurance is the problem you can't write files to them
too many times before they just actually wear out and when you run a full
computer operating system like rasbian which is just Linux you're going to
write to the thing you might write a log file you know once every few seconds and
eventually it just wears out the other annoying part is powering the thing
these use USBC but a common use case for a small computer like this is to embed
it in something like I don't know like a a menu board at McDonald's or digital
signage or something that controls your
sprinklers you can use them for anything but it's just kind of annoying to get around those problems s now in order to
expand the functionality and solve some of the problems I'm talking about people
have developed things called Raspberry Pi hats which are just little boards
that sit on top of your Raspberry Pi kind of like a hat to expand the
functionality and the coolest part about these newer Raspberry Pi 5ivs is they
actually have a PCIe connection a 1x PCI
Gen 2 Lane but you can set it to run at gen 3 speeds not a ton of bandwidth but
enough to run something like this which is an m.2 SSD and these these
have endurance way more than a Micro SD card anyways but that still leaves us
with the problem of power and now finally with a solution the pine board
hat Drive PoE plus which as the name
implies hat drive it's a hat that has a drive and also has PoE plus if you're
not familiar with PoE or power over Ethernet um that basically explains it
the Ethernet that's already on this Raspberry Pi 5 you can use to power the
Raspberry Pi and then you also have boom
an m.2 slot that means you've solved your power problem you've solved your
storage problem and you can put this thing somewhere and hopefully not have to worry about it and not have to run a
power cable as for what else came in the box with our hat Drive PoE we have nine
screws eight of which are going to be used for these little standoff things
that'll hold our board above the Raspberry Pi and the ninth one will be
for screwing in our m.2 SSD we have a little ribbon cable that'll handle our
PCIe connection between the rasp pie and this board for that SSD we have a pin
extension this one's cool it's a little four pin and if you look on the
Raspberry Pi you can see four little pins by the Ethernet Jack those are
specifically there for handling PoE so
if PoE power comes into this it's going to extend off of those and then now it
can reach the board which goes more like
this we'll put that on in a sec then there's the pin extension for the gpio
pins on the Raspberry Pi and a little spacer do add for the m.2 to sit nicely
I don't know products like this that are meant for like nerdy nerds sometimes
they just don't even come with instructions you just got to you just
got to figure it out like with um our LTT Precision screwdriver set right here
M very orange very precise very LTT
store I think I'm going to use a different Raspberry Pi uh I want to use
one that has the official raspberry pie cooler on it a just so it runs a little
bit cooler and B because I want to know if it all still fits got our standoffs
on there see that there it says PCIe that's where we want to go and the metal
parts of the ribbon should face inward
now for the fun part trying to stick this on while also inserting the
connector here not always the easiest
thing to do this is kind of weird the way this is laid out because those GPO
pins like they are accessible like you
could solder to them but they're they're only kind of accessible they don't stick
out very far and now we can install our SSD if you're not going to use a 2280
SSD which uses this hole right here you're going to use this little insert
guy except you need to do that before
you mount the board it has a little notch in it and
that is what holds the SSD in place so
the idea is you would screw this little holder in from the bottom and that would
hold the SSD down on the top we don't need to worry about that for the SSD
that we're using this Sabin gen 3 4 tbte
because it uses the already soldered in place stock hole look at that we now
have a Raspberry Pi with a 4 tbyte SSD on it and I don't
even need a power cable all I need is to plug that Ethernet Jack in and we're
going to be good to go oh God this is overkill an Enterprise
48 PoE but I didn't have a smaller PoE switch so deal with it now we get to
plug it in and see if she works but not before I tell you about our
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unlike some of the other PoE hats that are available on the market this one if
you noticed in the name is PoE plus not just normal PoE so you need to make sure
your switches PoE plus like this ubiquity Enterprise 48 PoE and that
means the Raspberry Pi gets full power 5 volts 5 amps 25 watts on this board so
you're not going to have any issues with USB peripherals if you plug them in uh
and apparently you don't even need to do any config the rasie will just be aware
that it's getting sufficient power which is great now I'm not actually sure how
you get an operating system on here cuz it's not like you know you're not
entering the BIOS of your Raspberry Pi usually you flash an image to the micro
SD card with something like etcher according to the instructions on Pine
board's website as long as the raspy has new enough firmware all we have to do is
plug it into an internet connection and
one that has PoE uh and it should bring up like the firmware installer over the
internet I don't know if it's actually going to work this SSD is technically
not brand new I did format it so all it
has on it is a GPT partition table but no partition so hopefully it works oh oh
okay I guess you just need to plug in a keyboard and then it changes press and
hold shift to stop Boot and start net install I had no idea you could do this
on a raspi this is so cool now if you don't have any storage in your Raspberry
Pi this is not going to be useful but we have this NVMe SSD So in theory once
this boots up and loads the installer looks like it's downloading right now
we'll be able to install Ras pios onto the nbme drive without having to do
anything weird no SD card required no I
don't know on the-go cable whatever we should just be able to do it like this
now if you already have a working Raspberry Pi 5 with an SD card and
you're wanting to add the NVMe drive on after there are tools you can use to
clone the drive hey look at that H Raspberry Pi with an NVMe drive
that's sick all right now that we've got the rasp piie working and running off of
our NVMe drive I want to do a speed test but before we can do that uh by default
the Raspberry Pi is going to be running this SSD at PCI Gen 2 by one which is
not that fast but it is what the PCIe connection on a pi5 is certified for
however you can tell it to run at gen 3
speeds and that will be twice as fast so
I'm going to do that it's pretty simple you just go into the firmware configur
ation thanks uh Jeff ging for this lovely set of instructions here and add
a little line like this DT Pam I'm just
going to copy paste it cuz that's easier let's see if we're running at the
correct speed now Fon Speed 8 gig transfers per second width by one woohoo
you can see it wants byy four because this SSD is a buy4 connection by default
um but we should be able to run at like
a gigabyte a a second potentially okay we're ready to do a little speed test
we're going to be using fio flexible IO tester which is a little command line
utility and then I've got HTP over here which will show us the CPU usage and the
disc iio and whatnot in theory the peak we can get is 1 gab per second hopefully
we can get pretty close to that hey look at that we're doing
780 is MB bytes per second which is
probably 800 something megabytes a second it'll tell us at the end let's
see our right speed 7 80 MB bytes or 820
megabytes per second that's not 100% of
what this PCI Lane can do but pretty dang close let's try read speed now yeah
850 mby bites what a weird word mby
bites Gibby bites is not nearly as bad but mby almost 900 megabytes a second
pretty sick eh off of a Raspberry Pi and
like to be honest I mean the m.2 is getting a little bit warm but if we're
being honest with ourselves warm to the touch is not that warm computer-wise the
point is the m.2 worked we didn't like lose power or anything while it was
running a speed test it's exactly what I hoped for So in theory you can just take
this Raspberry Pi unplug all this crap so we've just got Ethernet doing our
power we can get this monitor out of here no keyboard no mouse just an
Ethernet cable with PoE we've got a super fast Raspberry Pi that can do
almost a gigabyte read and write per second and we don't have to worry about
the endurance of a little micro SD card now this thing can get stuffed in a menu
board somewhere or in a drop ceiling or whatever it would be cool to take like
three of them and you could build like a cluster of raspberry pies or maybe 20 of
them and then put them in a rack and you don't have to run some stupid power spot
you just got PoE and you're good to go it's kind of
awesome how much does this cost €44 and
it's sold out well at some point you'll be able to
get one what's €44 so roughly
$465 for this board that would take your Raspberry Pi to be a little bit more
expensive I don't think it's going to be the best price to Performance if that's
what you're going for but if you just need one you need something small and
you need it stashed out of the way somewhere you don't need to worry about it this seems like a pretty awesome
single board Computer Solution I wish they just came like this like Raspberry
Pi 6 that better have PoE and an m.2 slot come on so thanks for watching guys
if you like this video hit the like button get subscribed and if you want
something else to watch maybe check out the video I did on this MacBook I'm
using it now I don't own it but I am using it and I quite like it