Raspberry Pi now sells branded storage (SD cards and SSDs)

The Raspberry Pi line of products are often refereed to as single-board computers because nearly everything you need to run them comes on a credit card-sized board including the processor, memory, storage, and plenty of I/O. One thing that isn’t usually included in the base price though? Storage.

For the Raspberry Pi 4 and earlier models, you had to install an operating system on a microSD card. Starting with the Raspberry Pi 5, there’s official support for PCIe SSDs (although you need an adapter to use them). And now Raspberry Pi sells officially branded versions of both.

Earlier this month, Raspberry Pi launched a line of official microSD cards that are Class A2 cards that come in 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB capacities and sell for about $10 and up – customers an choose between a blank microSD card or one that comes with Raspberry Pi OS pre-loaded.

And now Raspberry Pi has introduced its own line of PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSDs. Customers that already have a PCIe adapter for a Raspberry Pi Model 5 can pick up a 256GB or 512GB PCIe Gen 3 M.2 2230 card, while those who need an adapter can buy a Raspberry Pi SSD Kit that bundles one of those drives with a Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ adapter that sits on top of a Raspberry Pi 5 and leverages the board’s FPC connector for higher-speed storage (and other peripherals).

Raspberry Pi SSD prices start at $30 for a 256GB SSD or $45 for a 512GB drive. Add another $10 for the complete SSD Kit that includes the M.2 HAT+.

One thing to keep in mind is that the 512GB drives don’t just have twice the storage capacity of the 256GB models, but they’re also faster: Raspberry Pi says the higher capacity model supports more Input/Output operations per second (IOPS):