This is another one of those things………..All the information is out there.  Several good sources have blogged about it, but NO ONE has put it in a Dummies Guide for the rest of us to follow.

NVME support and NVME booting is now built in to Raspberry Pi OS.  If you have a Compute Module Lite you can use the SD Card Copier program to copy your SD card to your NVME drive and boot to the NVME by removing the SD card, however if you have a Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module with eMMC you have to change the Boot Order according to the docs. 

NOTE:  THIS IS SPECIFIC TO THE COMPUTE MODULE 4.  THERE IS AN EASIER WAY TO CHANGE THE BOOT ORDER WITH A REGULAR RASPBERRY PI IN PI OS.  DON’T GET THE METHODS CONFUSED.

It’s not hard to do this.  And even if you use an SD card it might shave a little time off the boot to not have it looking for other boot sources first.  I recommend doing the following steps anyway so the NVME drive is first in the boot order.

First and foremost I will assume you have a booting Raspberry Pi CM4:

• Raspberry Pi CM4 either with eMMC booting or via SD Card. (This example will be from SD) I have an 8GB with no WiFi or Bluetooth.
• NVME PCIe Adapter – This one works fine.
• SSD NVME – Bang for the buck I recommend the Samsung EVO 970 Plus I’ll be using the 2TB version of this card.
• A micro USB to USB cable.
• Power supply of 12 volts and probably a minimum of 2 amps.  I am using an old router brick that is 12v. 1.5 amps with no issues so far.  I do recommend around 20 watts of power for the board, adapter board, and SSD.

Once booted up normally with the adapter and nvme drive connected let’s check to see if it is recognized with these two commands:

lspci
lsblk

lspci and lsblk results (click pic to enlarge)

You can see the nvme drive is detected.  Good!

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The Raspberry Pi is a single board computer that came out in 2012 and cost $35.  The intent was to teach computer science and coding to school age children.  The program and the Pi itself  is (or was) a raging success.  Hobbyists flocked to the low cost board that ran Linux and created myriads of projects that were fun, useful and educational.   I’ve been raving on them since 2012.

I’m ready to stop raving.

Why?  Because you can’t get them anymore.  To exacerbate things even more the CEO of Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd. came out on April 4th on their website and said that current production was going to businesses that have their livelihood dependent upon Raspberry Pi.

I’m sure a more reasonable translation is “these are our biggest money producing customers and phooey on the individual consumer”.  That is of course my quote.

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Pi Compute Module 4

The Raspberry Pi Compute Module is an interesting concept mostly designed for embedded solutions.

A regular Raspberry Pi gives you an HDMI slot, a camera slot, GPIO Pins, USB, audio, etc. but a CM4 with the proper board can give you a PCIe slot, onboard SATA, or onboard NVME M.2

But where are those boards?

I’m looking for a board that will do NVME M.2 natively for a 3.15″ SSD.  I simply can’t find one.

You can take the official Raspberry Pi IO Board and add a PCIe adapter to achieve this but it is kind of a kluge the way it sits in the slot and to date I’ve seen no specific cases that would hold the board securely.

Plus if you give up that PCIe lane to the adapter you can’t use it for other cool things.

What’s a geek to do?

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I got the inspiration to build up this Raspberry Pi NAS with a Compute Module and SATA adapter from Jeff Geerling.  His blog page is here (linked with permission).  If you like Raspberry Pi even a little bit this guy pushes the Pi to the extreme.  His computer, networking, and Linux skills are exceptional and his delivery is easy to understand.  If you visit his blog click the YouTube icon on the right side of the page and visit his channel.  

Decided to turn my Pi Compute Module 4 into Network Attached Storage (NAS).  A real NAS.  While a Raspberry Pi NAS won’t light the networking world on fire it is more than adequate to serve up files.  I want to put this NAS out in my Shed for two reasons.

• Redundant backup in case the house burns down
• Use Squeezelite client to stream audio to my shed stereo, a circa 1980’s Technics Receiver.

I have a mini-ITX case and guts to put a “real” server out there but my shed is a woodworking shop and push come to shove I’d rather gum up the fan and overheat  $100 worth of Pi and Compute Module IO board than to blast a $450 server motherboard.  Besides lots of sawdust it gets wicked hot and wicked cold in the shed too. This computer is going to get dirty and this is a choice of economics as much as anything.

Making a Pi NAS is easy but it also ends up being a spaghetti mess and unless you design and 3D print a custom case the Compute Module just isn’t organically designed to fit any standard case out there.  We gotta get creative.

My cheap case is a Mini ITX case.  How I dealt with the installation was to keep the 500 watt power supply intact and to 3D print a case for the Compute Module IO board.  Then I just double side taped that to the inside of the enclosure.  Here’s a quick video of the build with details to follow.

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I built my first Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 project.  A 1TB NAS Drive using an NVME drive.

CM4 with NVME on PCIe Connector

These are the required parts:

Let’s talk about the parts somewhat.

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