McuZone PCIE M.2 NVME 2230 2242 Gen3 SSD HAT for Raspberry Pi 5 with LibreElec

  • Greetings --


    Hopefully this is the apropriate place to post, mostly just in the event that i'm not the only one who bought these things for this purpose and runs into issues -- I bought the MCUZone 2242 nvne SSD HAT for my Raspberry Pi 5 4GB. I bought the Pi itself simply because i had the option and not specifically for anything in particular, but ultimately decided to replace the Pi 4 I had been using for LibreElec with the newly-purchased Pi 5. I had an interest in using an nvme hat with it as well. When I first switched to the Pi 5, I rebuild my LE installation from the ground up using 11.04 and eventually switching to the then-current mid-december '23 nightly. My Pi 4 system was running from SATA SSD via USB; the new Pi 5 system was NVME via USB 3.0 enclosure -- Specifically "Inland USB-C to PCIe NVMe SSD Tool-Free Enclosure" from Microcenter. I've only used the Pi 5 with the official power supply, to be clear, running entirely from the SDD with no MicroSD card.

    The first issue I ran into with that setup was that the nvme-via-usb would randomly disconnect, then reconnect to the pi during operation, which would render the system unusuable beyon whatever was currently going on; that is, if a show as playing, the show would keep playing until i tried to interact with the system in anyway, where the disconnect would become very apparent and require a reboot. This issue was only an issue when I used the USB 3.0 ports on the Pi 5; the problem was almost nonexistent if the drive was connected to a USB 2.0 port.

    The appeal of the McuZone board for me was the price point. At the time I paid roughly $22 USD for the 2242 HAT + aluminum case, shipping included, purchased from AliExpress. I had bought a bunch of "Bowling Balls Named Homer" in the lead-up to the holiday season which included my Pi 5, so I didn't want to go too hard when it came to acessorizing :)

    The current board for sale is showing as purple in the image, which change between when I ordred and when I received the board -- my board is a green v1.1 board which does not have the holes in the board for the display and camera cables. The case was clearly designed for the Pi4, whcih is a s was clear from the images given the case has a cutout for the Pi4's 1/8 audio jack, and neither the MicroSD port nor the power button cutouts on the back of the case match up -- which is fine for me, as I just added an external switch to the Pi 5 via headers on the board by the fan.

    Operation-wise, I justt had to copy the external NVME image to my intended internal drive - -- "Inland TN436 512GB" from MicroCenter, and set up the pi's config.txt and eeprom settings for nvme -- good to go. I also changed the config.txt to run nvme at gen3 to maximize speed.

    The trouble was I kept running into an issue where every few-to-several hours the system would either shut itself down to the splash screen (version info in upper lefthand corner), or the system would run until I pushed a button on the remote, which would cause the system to instantly revert to the aforementioned screen. System was still accessible via SSH, but no action on screen without a reboot or cold boot.

    According to the log file, the system would become read-only somewhere along the line of the run, which would cause the system to fail or hang. Most of the intial issues seemed related to trying to update db files from EPG to Movies. These issues persisted through a downgrade from nightly to 11.04 and back up to the current nightly, at which point I edited the config.txt to run the nvme to gen2. All my problems went away when I did this, i've been running with no issues or need to reboot since. I obviously have no way to knwo if it's specifically the McuZone board, Libreelec, or the nvme that's caused this issue, but with respect to the fact that Pi 5 only officially supports gen2 nvme, I'm willing to lean that way. In the grand sceme of things, it isn't making to great a difference in any way. But I was thinking mabye I could save someone else a little headach in sharing my experience. :D