Raspberry Pi 5 Daily Driver

So I like computers, and during the Covid lock down I decided to treat myself to a new desktop computer. It’s a great machine and I love it, however it’s stupidly over powered for my day to day usage, and my power bill agrees with me. So I thought to myself what do I do day to day, well to be honest not really that much when it comes down to compute. I’m usually working on a single thing at a time, I don’t have multiple tabs in web browsers open, worse case I’ll have a few docker containers running while I’m coding something else. A desktop computer with 128Gb of memory and 2 RTX 3090s is overkill.

Raspberry Pi 5

So I was very lucky for my birthday to get gifted a Raspberry Pi 5. So I was struggling to think what to really do with it, as I usually have Raspberry Pi 4 devices that usually just end up in a Kubernetes cluster to run loads. Then I found the Pimoroni nvme base, which solves the issue that I’ve always had with Raspberry Pi as a desktop which was drive speed. So I purchased one, connected it all up and put in a basic 2Tb nvme drive and away we go.

I’ve decided to go with using just PiOS as it’s Debian based, and operating systems don’t really bother me that much as long as it does what it needs to do and get’s out of my way when I want then it’s all good. I’m usually spending most of my time spread across Codium, Terminal and Chromium so all the features of other Operating systems don’t really tempt me.

Initial Thoughts

So after a few weeks it’s performed above what I was expecting for my use cases. There is an issue with thermals when watching a YouTube video full screen, however I’m running with a stock fan in a quickly printed case. This would be solved with a heat sink, pmw fan and a more appropiate case. The nvme drive performs well, after some boot settings to make the link gen 3 rather than gen 2 I’m getting consistant speeds of 800mb which is more than enough for me, and much better than using an SD card by orders of magnitude.