RPi5 with 4TB NVMe SSD as Storage ?

    • New

    I am new to RPi5 and the NVMe SSD technology. My intent was to build a LibreElec (LE) system and use the NVMe SSD for storage.

    To date, I have updated the RPi5 eeprom firmware Feb 2024. The RPi5 has 8GB Ram

    I have imaged a 256GB Micro SD card with the latest LE Beta image. LE starts fine.

    The NVMe SSD is a Lexar NM790 4TB Gen=4

    Running parted, in a SSH session does see the NVMe SSD

    GNU Parted 3.6
    Using /dev/nvme0n1

    This is where I am stuck and am not sure how to enable LE to recognize the 4TB NMMe SSD.

    I have also tried to flash the Micro SD with Debian and could set the boot dtaram

    dtparam=nvme
    dtparam=pciex1_gen=3

    I could not find the config.txt file within the LE file structure

    If there is a howto, I would appreciated the support.

    Thank you in advance,

    JohnF

    • New

    MatteN ,

    if he has a NVMe to USB adapter and the luck, that his Luxar NVMe is supported by the RPi5 bootloader too you are more than right.

    But that the NVMe is detected by the kernel is unfortunately no guarantee that it boots from.

    appliedthinking,

    If have such adapter, that would be the easiest way. Depending on your experience with the Linux CLI and your goals there also other possibilities with dd and so on.

    Do you want remove the SD card and use the NVMe as boot device or only for /storage ?

    Because your kernel was already able to find the NVMe the line dtparam=nvme could be obsolete. The dtparam=pciex1_gen=3 is only to force PCIe bus to higher speed level. This speed is not official supported and can make additional trouble. My recommendation: activate these settings as the last step after all other things are ready and observe your dmesg log for sporadic PCIe error messages, to be safe and prevent data corruption.

    https://wiki.libreelec.tv/configuration/config_txt

    • New

    If the OP doesn't have a USB nvME interface then presumably you could boot into Raspberry OS from a uSD card or USB stick and then write the LibreElec image to the PCI-E connected NVMe drive from within Raspberry Pi OS assuming the Raspberry Pi OS 'sees' it. Once you make sure the EPROM bootloader has the PCI-E NVMe as a boot option you can then reboot to LE without the uSD or USB device installed on the Pi?


    I've not use LibreElec on a PCI-E NVMe Pi 5 - but that's how I installed Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu on two different Pi 5s with NVMe HATs.