In the market for a 1TB SSD? If you’ve got a spare $70/£68 and a penchant for Raspberry Pi-branded devices you’re in luck, as the company has just started selling one!
—you were worried I’d dragged this blog down the ‘deals post’ slop-hole for a second, weren’t you?
Raspberry Pi is best known for single-board computers of varying sizes, capabilities and price points.
But it’s leaned hard into offering all kinds of add-ons and accessories, including keyboard, mice, cameras, AI accelerator boards, USB hub, and even a portable USB monitor.
This year it branched out into offering storage options too.
Raspberry Pi-branded SD cards support command queuing on the Pi 5 and deliver reliably read/write speeds (unlike many cheaper off-brand options).
While its affordable own-brand SSDs start at jus $30/£28 and also deliver reliable performance for the price and offer the assurance of being compatible with official and third-party M.2/NVMe HATs made for the Raspberry Pi.
When announced, the M.2 2230 Rasberry Pi SSDs were available in 256GB and 512GB options. Today, a 1TB SSD option is available for purchase — more storage than my Pi would dream of, but ideal for a home-spun retro media center or gaming hub.
Like the others, the new 1TB SSD is PCIe Gen 3-compliant, but unlike the lower-capacity versions, has better read performance:
- 90k IOPS (4kB random reads)
- 90k IOPS (4kB random writes)
Performance-minded gamers or data-intensive nerds may scoff at that given something like the 1TB Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus passes 600k IOPS, but as this is a) cheap, b) intended for a Raspberry Pi not a beefy gaming rig and c) faster than a SD card…
It’s fine.
“How much data can a terabyte store? TL;DR: Loads. For example, you can save a quarter of a million photos, 200,000 songs (my first MP3 player held just 40… it got awfully repetitive), 250 HD movies, or 20–30 AAA games,” Raspberry Pi’s Ashley Whittaker quips.
Of course, to use this with the Raspberry Pi 5 some kind of M.2 adapter HAT is required. Plenty of companies offer these, some for as low as $10. For a cheap and effective way to get sigifincatly faster boot times, performance and hoarding capabilities, not bad!
The 1TB SSD is available to buy from all approved Raspberry Pi resellers from today, and price-inflated scalpers in a week or two ;).