NVMe

11 Articles

The assembled PCB on red foam, with both a USB-C connector and the ASM2464PD chip visible

Finally Taming Thunderbolt With Third-Party Chips

April 4, 2024 by 16 Comments

Thunderbolt has always been a functionally proprietary technology, held secret by Intel until “opening” the standard in a way that evidently wasn’t enough for anyone to meaningfully join in. At least, until last year, when we saw announcements about ASMedia developing two chips for Thunderbolt use. Now, we are starting to see glimmers of open source, letting us tinker with PCIe at prices lower than $100 per endpoint.

In particular, this board from [Picomicro] uses the ASM2464PD — a chipset that supports TB3/4/USB4, and gives you a 4x PCIe link. Harnessing the 40 Gbps power to wire up an NVMe SSD, this board shows us it’s very much possible to design a fully functional ASM2464PD board without the blessing of Intel. With minimal footprint that barely extends beyond the 2230 SSD it’s designed for, curved trace layout, and a CNC-milled case, this board sets a high standard for a DIY Thunderbolt implementation.

The main problem is that this project is not open-source – all we get is pretty pictures and a bit of technical info. Thankfully, we’ve also seen [WifiCable] take up the mantle of making this chip actually hobbyist-available – she’s created a symbol, fit a footprint, and made an example board in KiCad retracing [Picomicro]’s steps in a friendly fashion. The board is currently incomplete because it needs someone to buy an ASM2464PD enclosure on Aliexpress and reverse-engineer the missing circuitry, but if open-source Thunderbolt devices are on your wish list, this is as close as you get today – maybe you’ll be able to make an eGPU adapter, even. In the meantime, if you don’t want to develop hardware but want to take advantage of Thunderbolt, you can build 10 Gbps point-to-point networks.

The FPC adapter shown soldered between the BGA chip and the phone's mainboard, with the phone shown to have successfully booted, displaying an unlock prompt on the screen

IPhone 6S NVMe Chip Tapped Using A Flexible PCB

March 3, 2024 by 3 Comments

Psst! Hey kid! Want to reverse-engineer some iPhones? Well, did you know that modern iPhones use PCIe, and specifically, NVMe for their storage chips? And if so, have you ever wondered about sniffing those communications? Wonder no more, as this research team shows us how they tapped them with a flexible printed circuit (FPC) BGA interposer on an iPhone 6S, the first iPhone to use NVMe-based storage.

The research was done by [Mohamed Amine Khelif], [Jordane Lorandel], and [Olivier Romain], and it shows us all the nitty-gritty of getting at the NVMe chip — provided you’re comfortable with BGA soldering and perhaps got an X-ray machine handy to check for mistakes. As research progressed, they’ve successfully removed the memory chip dealing with underfill and BGA soldering nuances, and added an 1:1 interposer FR4 board for the first test, that proved to be successful. Then, they made an FPC interposer that also taps into the signal and data pins, soldered the flash chip on top of it, successfully booted the iPhone 6S, and scoped the data lines for us to see.

This is looking like the beginnings of a fun platform for iOS or iPhone hardware reverse-engineering, and we’re waiting for further results with bated breath! This team of researchers in particular is prolific, having already been poking at things like MITM attacks on I2C and PCIe, as well as IoT device and smartphone security research. We haven’t seen any Eagle CAD files for the interposers published, but thankfully, most of the know-how is about the soldering technique, and the paper describes plenty. Want to learn more about these chips? We’ve covered a different hacker taking a stab at reusing them before. Or perhaps, would you like to know NVMe in more depth? If so, we’ve got just the article for you.

We thank [FedX] for sharing this with us on the Hackaday Discord server!

Pineberry Pi HatDrive: Using NVMe SSDs With The Raspberry Pi 5

November 19, 2023 by 27 Comments

When the Raspberry Pi 5 launched, many were left chomping at the bit after seeing the PCIe FPC connector alongside the promise that an ‘NVMe SSD HAT would be forthcoming’. Although the official Raspberry Pi NVMe HAT is still a long while off, the Polish company Pineberry Pi is ramping up to release its Top & Bottom versions of its very wittily called HatDrive.

They sent a prototype to [Jeff Geerling], who has been putting his grubby mitts all over them before putting together a video showing off the HatDrive Top, which can accept 2230 and 2242 size NVMe drives.

The primary goal of adding an NVMe drive to the RPi is of course to get rid of those slow and fragile SD cards. Although the SD card standard supports near-NVMe-like speeds with UHS-III, the Raspberry Pi 5 bottoms out at UHS-I, around 100 MB/s. Despite this, using an NVMe drive for booting still takes some work, as [Jeff] lays out in a clear article. Most of this involves tweaking the /boot/config.txt file to enable external PCIe support, editing the onboard EEPROM to change the boot order (in lieu of having a PC-like BIOS screen) and getting the OS image flashed onto the NVMe drive you intend to boot from.

Although things seem to work fine during [Jeff]’s testing, some caveats remain, such as the RPi 5 officially supporting only PCIe Gen 2 x1, with Gen 3 possible, but with potential data integrity issues. There’s also the fundamental limit of having only a single lane of PCIe available. If that’s no problem, then Pineberry Pi offers the aforementioned HatDrive Top for traditional HAT-style mounting, and a Bottom version that can accept up to 2280 format NVMe SSDs. Including the provided ribbon cables, you can order the Top and Bottom for €20 and €25.99 respectively, with the first batch to ship in early December.

Continue reading “Pineberry Pi HatDrive: Using NVMe SSDs With The Raspberry Pi 5” →

Booting The Raspberry Pi 5 With An NVMe SSD

October 25, 2023 by 27 Comments

The Raspberry Pi has come a long way since its humble origins, adding faster processors and better interfaces with each new generation. Now, the Raspberry Pi 5 has a lovely new PCIe port right on board, and [Jeff Geerling] has gone right ahead and slammed in an NVMe SSD as a boot drive.

[Jeff] explains that to use an NVMe to boot, you first have to modify /boot/config.txt to enable PCIe and modify the Raspberry Pi’s boot order. Once the bootloader is appropriately configured, you can boot straight off an SSD with Raspberry Pi OS installed. To get the operating system on to an NVMe drive, he recommends cloning an existing boot volume from a microSD install.

One of the primary reasons you might want to do this is speed. NVMe drives are generally a significant cut above even the best microSD cards, both in speed and reliability. [Jeff] also notes that you can use an NVMe SSD through a PCIe switch on the Pi 5 if you so desire, but you can’t currently boot with this configuration.

It’s a great feature to have on the Pi 5, and it follows on from the earlier implementation on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Booting The Raspberry Pi 5 With An NVMe SSD” →

M.2 For Hackers – Expand Your Laptop

October 27, 2022 by 55 Comments

You’ve seen M.2 cards in modern laptops already. If you’re buying an SSD today, it’s most likely an M.2 one. Many of our laptops contain M.2 WiFi cards, the consumer-oriented WWAN cards now come in M.2, and every now and then we see M.2 cards that defy our expectations. Nowadays, using M.2 is one of the most viable ways for adding new features to your laptop. I have found that the M.2 standard is quite accessible and also very hackable, and I would like to demonstrate that to you.

If you ever searched the Web trying to understand what makes M.2 tick, you might’ve found one of the many confusing articles which just transcribe stuff out of the M.2 specification PDF, and make things look more complicated than they actually are. Let’s instead look at M.2 real-world use. Today, I’ll show you the M.2 devices you will encounter in the wild, and teach you what you need to know to make use of them. In part 2, I will show you how to build your own M.2 cards and card-accepting devices, too!

Well Thought-Out, Mostly

You can genuinely appreciate the M.2 standard once you start looking into it, especially if you have worked with mPCIe devices for some amount of time. mPCIe is what we’ve been using for all these years, and it gradually became a mish-mash of hardly-compatible pinouts. As manufacturers thought up all kinds of devices they could embed, you’d find hacks like mSATA and WWAN coexistence extensions, and the lack of standardization is noticeable in things like mPCIe WWAN modems as soon as you need something like UART or PCM. The M.2 specification, thankfully, accounted for all of these lessons.

Continue reading “M.2 For Hackers – Expand Your Laptop” →

On the left, the Thunderbolt chip as mounted on the motherboard originally. On the right, the shim installed in place of a Thunderbolt BGA chip, with the IPEX connector soldered on

Macbook Gets NVMe SSD With Help Of A BGA-Imitating PCB

May 31, 2022 by 12 Comments

Recently, we stumbled upon a video by [iBoff], adding an M.2 NVMe port to a 2011-2013 MacBook. Apple laptops never came with proper M.2 ports, especially the A1278 – so what’s up? The trick is – desoldering a PCIe-connected Thunderbolt controller, then soldering a BGA-like interposer PCB in place of where the chip was, and pulling a cable assembly from there to the drive bay, where a custom adapter PCB awaits. That adapter even lets you expose the PCIe link as a full-sized PCIe 4x slot, in case you want to connect an external GPU instead of the NVMe SSD!

The process is well-documented in the video, serving as an instruction manual for anyone attempting to install this specific mod, but also a collection of insights and ideas for anyone interested in imitating it. The interposer board ships with solder balls reballed onto it, so that it can be installed in the same way that a BGA chip would be – but the cable assembly connector isn’t installed onto the interposer, since it has to be soldered onto the mainboard with hot air, which would then melt the connector. The PCB that replaces the optical drive makes no compromises, either, tapping into the SATA connector pins and letting you add an extra 2.5mm SATA SSD.

Adding an NVMe drive is an underappreciated way to speed up your old laptop, and since they’re all PCIe under the hood, you can really get creative with the specific way you add it. You aren’t even limited to substituting obscure parts like Thunderbolt controllers – given a laptop with a discrete GPU and a CPU-integrated one, you could get rid of the discrete GPU and replace it with an adapter for one, or maybe even two NVMe drives, and all you need is a PCB that has the same footprint as your GPU. Sadly, the PCB files for this adapter don’t seem to be open-source, but developing a replacement for your own needs would be best started from scratch, either way.

We’ve seen such an adapter made for a Raspberry Pi 4 before, solderable in place of a QFN USB 3.0 controller chip and exposing the PCIe signals onto the USB 3 connector pins. However, this one takes it up a notch! Typically, without such an adapter, we have to carefully solder a properly shielded cable if we want to get a PCIe link from a board that never intended to expose one. What’s up with PCIe and why is it cool? We’ve talked about that in depth!

Continue reading “Macbook Gets NVMe SSD With Help Of A BGA-Imitating PCB” →

Developing Your Own Digital Film

April 20, 2022 by 5 Comments

In the olden days, you would have a roll of film that you could take to your local drug store and have them develop it. But a serious photographer would likely develop their own photos to maintain complete creative control. While photo editing software has largely replaced the darkroom of old, the images are still held on physical media, and that means there’s room for improvement and customization. In an article for photofocus, [Joseph Nuzzo] shows how you can make your own CFexpress card — the latest and greatest in the world of digital camera storage tech — for less than $100 USD.

The idea here is pretty simple, as CFexpress uses PCIe with a different connector. Essentially all you have to do is get a M.2 2230 NVMe drive and put it into an adapter. In this case [Joseph] is using a turn-key model from Sintech, but we’ve shown in the past how you can roll your own.

Now you might not give it much thought normally, but NVMe devices get pretty hot. This usually isn’t problem inside a large computer case, where they often have large amounts of air blowing over them. But inside a camera you need to dissipate that heat, so thermal compound is a must. With everything screwed together, you have your own card that’s faster and cheaper than commercial offerings.

It’s no secret that there’s a lot of love for NVMe. It’s easy, fast, and adaptable. Since the M.2 slot format includes SATA and PCIe, there’s a likely chance there is a PCIe bus in many cameras. The PCIe bus on the Pi has been convenient for hacking, and we wonder what sort of hacks are out there for cameras.