Image of the Raspberry Pi 5

SunFounder Pironman 5 NVMe Mini PC Case Review

Disk Performance

I evaluated the NVMe performance with KDiskMark, a free and open source graphical frontend to Flexible I/O. The software provides an easy to view and interpret comprehensive benchmark result.

I’ll use Flatpak to install KDiskMark. First install the Flatpak package:

$ sudo apt install flatpak

Install Flatpak on a Raspberry Pi 5

Add the Flatpak repository:

$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Add the Flatpak repository

Restart the Pi 5.

KDiskMark is installed with the command:

$ flatpak install flathub io.github.jonmagon.kdiskmark

Sunfounder Pironman 5

Here are the results for my Samsung SSD 980 1TB NVMe. As you can see, I’m getting 442 MB/s reads and 428MB/s writes for large files. That’s lower than expected.

Sunfounder Pironman 5

After a bit of digging I realized the Pi doesn’t have PCIe Gen 3 enabled. That’s easily fixed by running raspi-config, navigate to Advanced Options / PCIe speed and enable PCIe Gen 3.

Re-running KDiskMark, and I get the following results which are in line with expectations.

Sunfounder Pironman 5

For comparison purposes, I also tested a SanDisk 512GB microSDXC card in the Pi 5. While the card gets 134 MB/s reads for large files, read performance for small files and write performance is abysmal. You may notice I changed the font. That’s because I think the Raspberry Pi OS’s default font is unattractive.

SD card performance

Running the Pi from an NVMe makes a big difference when using the Pi as a desktop machine.

Next page: Page 5 – WiFi Performance

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Assembly
Page 2 – Software
Page 3 – Cooling
Page 4 – Disk Performance
Page 5 – WiFi Performance
Page 6 – Summary


All articles in this series:

Raspberry Pi 5 Series
Hardware
iRasptek Starter KitAll the kit you need to get started with the Pi 5
Pironman 5 Case ReviewTransform the Pi 5 into a beautiful desktop mini PC
Passive Cooling the Pi 5Passively cool your Pi 5 the right way. Silent yet cool
BenchmarkingBenchmarking the Pi 5 against an Intel N100 mini PC
OverclockingLet's increase the clock speed of the BCM2712 SoC
Power ConsumptionCompare the power consumption of the Pi 5 with Intel Mini PCs
2.5Gbps NetworkingImproving the wired performance of the Pi 5
Configuration
raspi-configUseful text-based tool to configure the Pi 5
PiGroGUI tool that streamlines the process of managing the Pi 5
Increase Swap Memory SizeIncrease the swap size from 512MB to 2GB
ZRAM swapdriveSimple script to use a ZRAM swapdrive instead of a swapfile
Software
Installing SoftwareDifferent ways to install software on the Pi 5
df snap pollutionReplace df with dysk
Ollama GUIRunning Large Language Models on the Pi 5
Many software articles are planned. Stay tuned!
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