Although the Raspberry Pi 5 has a PCIe interface, it doesn’t have a slot for a PCIe SSD. There’s now a whole range of plug-in boards (HATs = Hardware Attached on Top) for retrofitting SSDs.

Our list has picks for best PCIe 4.0 SSD overall, best on a budget, best for a game consoles, and more. Plus what you need to know about ultra-fast PCIe 4.0 drives in general.

The Photowave product line includes various form factors, including a standard PCIe card (shown below), OCP 3.0 SFF card, and an active optical cable to achieve deployment of CXL-based infrastructure.

While the M.2 form factor is by far the most common — and can still be used with SATA drives — using it with a PCIe SSD will restrict bandwidth to x4 lanes and hinder overall performance.

Future PCIe Gen 5.0 SSDs may be much larger than the previous models, and while that can be a good thing in terms of performance and cooling, it could also have one key flaw -- compatibility.

As the launch of next generation platforms with PCIe 5.0 SSD support draws closer, Phison has showcased a PCIe 5.0 SSD in action. As expected, it's fast. The engineering sample drive is based on ...

In this case, we’re looking at 1.7x and 1.9x faster speeds than PCIe 4.0 drives, respectively. Power consumption goes up to 608 MB/s per watt for the PCIe 5.0 SSD.