Cytron Technologies is quite excited about the release of stable USB boot firmware for the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, 400 and also CM4. And with the Compute Module 4 (CM4), the PCIe Gen2 bus has been exposed on some carrier boards, like Piunora or Mini Base (A). In addition, Raspberry Pi officially publishes NVMe booting. This is native NVMe SSD boot over the PCIe bus, it does not go through any USB-NVMe adapter. This NVMe SSD is in M.2 2242 (B+M Key) form factor. Cytron calls it MakerDisk! A drive from makers to makers :) It is an M.2 2242, B+M-Key, NVMe Solid State Drive (SSD) with a capacity of 128 GB. And it comes preloaded with Raspberry Pi OS.

Note: NVMe 2242 M-Key MakerDisk SSD 512GB, 256GB and 128GB, shipped from January 2024 onwards, is loaded with the latest Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) - Bookworm - operating system (release date: 5 December 2023).

Features

• Brand: MakerDisk
• Form factor: M.2 2242 B+M-Key NVMe SSD: M.2 2242 B+M-Key NVMe SSD
• Preloaded with Raspberry Pi operating system
• NOT a SATA drive
• High resistance to shock, vibration and high temperatures.
• SMART and TRIM support
• PCIe interface: PCIe Gen 3 x 2
• Compliance: PCI Express Base 3.1: NVMe 1.3, PCI Express Base 3.1.
• Capacity: 256 GB
• Performance:
  • Read: MB/s
  • Write speed: Up to 600MB/s
• Shock: 1500G/0.5ms
• Operating temperature: 0°C-70°C
• Up to 30 times faster than a typical hard disk drive.
• Improves sequential write performance, making it ideal for typical computer tasks.
• Faster boot, shutdown, application loading and responsiveness for Raspberry Pi computers.

Package contents

• 1 x NVMe 2242 B+M-Key MakerDisk SSD - 256GB (preloaded with Raspberry Pi operating system)

Links

• Using the Raspberry Pi Imager, Raspberry Pi Foundation release
• Raspberry Pi Imager
• Raspberry Pi official NVMe boot
• Raspberry Pi can now boot from NVMe SSDs
• Bullseye - the new version of Raspberry Pi OS
• Raspberry Pi OS download page

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