With its slimmer install footprint, smarter booting process and qualitative tweaks, Ubuntu 25.10 for Raspberry Pi is looking a real treat — but the biggest boost to performance is one you can make by switching from a microSD card to an SSD.
If you own a Raspberry Pi 5 and have yet to leap to a more spacious, speedier solid-state drive, Raspberry Pi today launched the M.2 HAT+ Compact. It’s a smaller (but marginally more expensive) version of its official storage add-on for the Raspberry Pi 5.
Better yet, the board with an SSD attached will fit inside of the official case with its fan attached, for ultimate tidiness.
“M.2 HAT+ Compact allows you to squeeze a 2230-format (30mm long) M.2 PCI Express card inside our official case, nestled neatly between the fan and the USB connectors,” Pi founder, Eben Upton, says of his company’s latest accessory.
Raspberry Pi has a standard M.2 HAT+, and like a lot of 3rd-party SSD boards available that make use Pi 5’s single-lane PCIe 2.0 interface, it’s a slab with a flexible FPC cable that is finicky to fit connects the board to the connector.
Those (comparatively) bigger M.2 boards are not a major drawback to most (especially those who house their Pi 5 in those cool LED-lit ‘tower’ style cases) but fit-conscious folks can see there’s (pardon the pun) room for improvement — as the $10 HatDrive! Nano proved.
Raspberry Pi has seen fit (sorry/not sorry) to follow suit.
“To help us fit into the incredibly tight available space, the Compact variant replaces the FPC cable and socket with a single flex-rigid PCB; this is the first time we’ve used this technology, and we’re rather pleased with how it’s turned out,” Upton adds.
The smaller footprint of the board itself means the M.2 HAT+ Compact only fits 2230 size SSDs (which, helpfully, Raspberry Pi also make). It all fits inside the official case (not the sexiest case granted, but discrete, cheap and space saving) with the official fan.
Cost? From ~$15/£13.50 from Raspberry Pi approved resellers — which is nominal outlay to gain access to significantly better read/write speeds than even the best microSD card can offer.
Still, if you’re repurposing an SSD you already own that is longer, the official M.2 HAT+ supports 2230 and 2242 while third-party boards (like the Pimoroni NVMe Base I use) can accommodate 2260 and 2280 sized SSDs too.