2024’s Fastest Raspberry Pi 5 Storage Benchmark Results

Pi Benchmarks has officially passed over 100,000 tests submitted! The site’s earliest tests started in early 2019 giving us over 5 years worth of real world testing by the single board computer (SBC) community across different boards.

Today we are going to cover the fastest combinations of hardware on the Raspberry Pi 5 to achieve the absolute highest storage scores and performance possible (and the top result *will* surprise you).

Let’s get started!

Best SSDs

Top SSD Result #3 – Corsair MP600 Mini

Rank:	#3
Popularity:	#84
# Tests:	182
Brand:	Corsair MP600 Mini
Amazon AliExpress*
Average High Low 62,187 68,870 20,409

This is a very practical drive choice for the Raspberry Pi 5. It is meant to go into compact devices and is designed for use with things like the Steam Deck, Microsoft Surface, etc.

The drive’s technical size is a M.2 2230 (as opposed to the standard / full size of M.2 2280). This is also a popular drive choice for alternative boards such as the Orange Pi 5.

The drive is also a PCIe gen 4.0 but lists backwards compatibility as a primary design choice (and it does indeed work very well in backwards compatible mode with devices like the Pi). This is a highly recommended drive.

Top SSD Result #2 – Corsair MP600 GS

Rank:	#2
Popularity:	#172
# Tests:	86
Brand:	Corsair MP600 GS
Amazon AliExpress*
Average High Low 63,321 68,214 43,474

This is another very practical drive choice for the Raspberry Pi 5. It is a bigger, full size drive but you will save about $20 (at time of writing) over the MP600 Mini version.

The GS version is a bit of a budget version as the MP600 non-GS version can do 4950 MB/s while the GS version does 4800 MB/s. This difference is absolutely negligible so if you aren’t going to get the MP600 mini version I would go with the GS. The Raspberry Pi 5 can’t take advantage of the faster PCIe 4.0 speeds anyway so there will be no practical difference on the device.

The drive’s average scores are very close. Don’t be surprised if you are reading this article 6 months after publishing if they’ve flipped slightly on the charts!

Top SSD Result #1 – Intel Optane P1600X

So far the list has been pretty straightforward. It’s dominated by the newest models of PCIe 4.0/5.0 drives which is exactly what we would expect. Until now.

Ladies and gentleman, the fastest Raspberry Pi 5 storage device in the entire world is: the Intel Optane P1600X?! What?!!

The ingenuity and resourcefulness of the Raspberry Pi and single board computer community never cease to amaze me. While this is a surprising result it actually makes perfect sense. To understand why we need to understand what Intel Optane is (or was).

What Is / Was Intel Optane?

Intel Optane was a attempt to create and promote a tier of memory that’s a little slower than RAM but had the virtues of persistence and high IOPS. It was discontinued in July of 2022.

In other words, it was meant to be essentially a cache that is faster than your disk but slower than your RAM. It was designed to bridge the gap between disk and RAM (and thus has some characteristics of both).

This replacement technology needed to have extremely fast random read/write speeds to be effective. To accomplish this Intel and Micron worked together to make a new type of non-volatile RAM called 3D XPoint (non-volatile just means when you reboot the computer or it loses power the contents aren’t lost like they are with regular memory).

3D XPoint technology is the reason that the Intel Optane P1600X is absolutely stomping brand new PCIe 4.0/5.0 SSDs. This drive is *not* a traditional SSD. It’s actually a special type of RAM that doesn’t lose it’s contents when the computer is shut down and performs *extremely* well on random read/write performance (PERFECT for an operating system).

If it’s so fast on the Raspberry Pi should I use Optane in my PC?

Nope. The reason these drives are so fast with the Raspberry Pi 5 is because you can’t take advantage of PCIe 4.0/5.0 with a Pi at this time. The throughput of PCIe 4.0/5.0 is much higher than any of these Intel Optane drives are capable of.

In other words the only reason that these are the fastest drives for the Raspberry Pi is because the Raspberry Pi 5 can’t utilize the newer higher versions of PCIe (but a modern computer can). You will be better off with a PCIe 4.0/5.0 gen drive in a modern computer than you will with these Optane drives. Intel Optane drives are only PCIe gen 3.0. There are no PCIe 4.0 or 5.0 Optane drives and it’s overwhelmingly likely there never will be as the technology is discontinued.

Because of this PCIe version limitation of the Raspberry Pi the extremely high random read/write performance of the older Intel Optane drives make it the fastest drive in the world you can use on a Raspberry Pi 5.

The tradeoffs simply are working in the Pis favor with Intel Optane creating this really weird (and temporary) dynamic where if you are still stuck on PCIe 3.0 or lower the special memory used in this SSD is faster than anything else (including sticking a PCIe 4.0 or 5.0 drive into a Pi which can’t utilize the newer technology and throughput).

Should I get Optane for my Raspberry Pi 5?

Probably not really unless you find ones for a really reasonable price still out there. It’s completely sold out on all major sites like Amazon, etc.

Unless you have the most extreme of performance requirements (you’ll know if it applies to you) you’d probably be better off buying a modern PCIe 4.0/5.0 drive even for the Raspberry Pi.

If you do have one laying around or find a cheap listing though then yes. As I’ve laid out there is no faster choice you could make to get extremely fast random read/write performance. The Optane drives are generally not very large and capacities range from 16GB to something like 108GB

Best Adapters

This section will be a little bit easy to cover. Let’s start with the king:

Top Performing

This thing is absurd. I’ve been covering Raspberry Pis for a long time and this may be one of the most over the top accessories I’ve ever seen. RGB lighting and an OLED display?!

There is no arguing with the performance though. Many of the top spots on pibenchmarks.com specifically mention using this enclosure / adapter for their NVMe / storage performance.

Budget Choices

The X1001 and X1002 adapters for the Raspberry Pi generally range from $12-$15 or so and are much more budget friendly than the Pironman 5 case. They still have several results on the #1 top results page that used this set of adapters.

Testing Your Own Storage

Running the benchmark is extremely easy. Run the following command on your Pi:

sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/PiBenchmarks/master/Storage.sh | sudo bash

Current Benchmark Results

Pi Benchmarks – Raspberry Pi Storage Benchmarks