Most Raspberry Pi single-board computers, with the exception of the Raspberry Pi Zero and A+ form factors, incorporate an on-board USB hub to fan out a single USB connection from the core silicon, and provide multiple downstream USB Type-A ports. But no matter how many ports we provide, sometimes you just need more peripherals than we have ports. And with that in mind, today we’re launching the official Raspberry Pi USB 3 Hub, a high-quality four-way USB 3.0 hub for use with your Raspberry Pi or other, lesser, computer.
Key features include:
A single upstream USB 3.0 Type-A connector on an 8 cm captive cable
Four downstream USB 3.0 Type-A ports
Aggregate data transfer speeds up to 5 Gbps
USB-C socket for optional external 3A power supply (sold separately)
Race you to the bottom
Why design our own hub? Well, we’d become frustrated with the quality and price of the hubs available online. Either you pay a lot of money for a nicely designed and reliable product, which works well with a broad range of hosts and peripherals; or you cheap out and get something much less compatible, or unreliable, or ugly, or all three. Sometimes you spend a lot of money and still get a lousy product.
It felt like we were trapped in a race to the bottom, where bad quality drives out good, and marketplaces like Amazon end up dominated by the cheapest thing that can just about answer to the name “hub”.
So, we worked with our partners at Infineon to source a great piece of hub silicon, CYUSB3304, set Dominic to work on the electronics and John to work on the industrial design, and applied our manufacturing and distribution capabilities to make it available at the lowest possible price. The resulting product works perfectly with all models of Raspberry Pi computer, and it bears our logo because we’re proud of it: we believe it’s the best USB 3.0 hub on the market today.
Grab one and have a play: we think you’ll like it.
Way back in 2015, we launched the Raspberry Pi Touch Display, a 7″ 800×480-pixel LCD panel supporting multi-point capacitive touch. It remains one of our most popular accessories, finding a home in countless maker projects and embedded products. Today, we’re excited to announce Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2, at the same low price of $60, offering both a higher 720×1280-pixel resolution and a slimmer form factor.
Key features of Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 include:
Touch Display 2 is powered from your Raspberry Pi, and is compatible with all Raspberry Pi computers from Raspberry Pi 1B+ onwards, except for the Raspberry Pi Zero series which lack the necessary DSI port. It attaches securely to your Raspberry Pi with four screws, and ships with power and data cables compatible with both standard and mini FPC connector formats. Unlike its predecessor, Touch Display 2 integrates the display driver PCB into the display enclosure itself, delivering a much slimmer form factor.
Like its predecessor, Touch Display 2 is fully supported by Raspberry Pi OS, which provides drivers to support five-finger touch and an on-screen keyboard. This gives you full functionality without the need for a keyboard or mouse. While it is a native portrait-format 720×1280-pixel panel, Raspberry Pi OS supports screen rotation for users who would prefer to use it in landscape orientation.
Consistent with our commitment to long product availability lifetimes, the original Touch Display will remain in production for the foreseeable future, though it is no longer recommended for new designs. Touch Display 2 will remain in production until 2030 at the earliest, allowing our embedded and industrial customers to build it into their products and installations with confidence.
We’ve never gone nine years between refreshes of a significant accessory before. But we took the time to get this one just right, and are looking forward to seeing how you use Touch Display 2 in your projects and products over the next nine years and beyond.
As our product line expands, it can get confusing trying to keep track of all the different Raspberry Pi boards out there. Here is a high-level breakdown of Raspberry Pi models, including our flagship series, Zero series, Compute Module series, and Pico microcontrollers.
Raspberry Pi makes computers in several different series:
The flagship series, often referred to by the shorthand ‘Raspberry Pi’, offers high-performance hardware, a full Linux operating system, and a variety of common ports in a form factor roughly the size of a credit card.
The Zero series offers a full Linux operating system and essential ports at an affordable price point in a minimal form factor with low power consumption.
The Compute Module series, often referred to by the shorthand ‘CM’, offers high-performance hardware and a full Linux operating system in a minimal form factor suitable for industrial and embedded applications. Compute Module models feature hardware equivalent to the corresponding flagship models but with fewer ports and no on-board GPIO pins. Instead, users should connect Compute Modules to a separate baseboard that provides the ports and pins required for a given application.
Additionally, Raspberry Pi makes the Pico series of tiny, versatile microcontroller boards. Pico models do not run Linux or allow for removable storage, but instead allow programming by flashing a binary onto on-board flash storage.
Flagship series
Model B indicates the presence of an Ethernet port. Model A indicates a lower-cost model in a smaller form factor with no Ethernet port, reduced RAM, and fewer USB ports to limit board height.
HDMI, 4 × USB 2.0, CSI camera port, DSI display port, 3.5mm AV jack, Ethernet (100Mb/s), 2.4GHz single-band 802.11n Wi-Fi (35Mb/s), Bluetooth 4.1, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), microSD card slot, micro USB power
HDMI, 4 × USB 2.0, CSI camera port, DSI display port, 3.5mm AV jack, PoE-capable Ethernet (300Mb/s), 2.4/5GHz dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi (100Mb/s), Bluetooth 4.2, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), microSD card slot, micro USB power
HDMI, USB 2.0, CSI camera port, DSI display port, 3.5mm AV jack, 2.4/5GHz dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi (100Mb/s), Bluetooth 4.2, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), microSD card slot, micro USB power
2 × micro HDMI, 2 × USB 2.0, 2 × USB 3.0, CSI camera port, DSI display port, 3.5 mm AV jack, PoE-capable Gigabit Ethernet (1Gb/s), 2.4/5GHz dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi (120Mb/s), Bluetooth 5, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), microSD card slot, USB-C power (5V, 3A (15W))
Models with the H suffix have header pins pre-soldered to the GPIO header. Models that lack the H suffix do not come with header pins attached to the GPIO header; the user must solder pins manually or attach a third-party pin kit.
All Zero models have the following connectivity:
a microSD card slot
a CSI camera port (version 1.3 of the original Zero introduced this port)
a mini HDMI port
2 × micro USB ports (one for input power, one for external devices)
Models with the H suffix have header pins pre-soldered to the GPIO header. Models that lack the H suffix do not come with header pins attached to the GPIO header; the user must solder pins manually or attach a third-party pin kit.
To help you get the best out of your Raspberry Pi 5, today we’re launching a range of Raspberry Pi-branded NVMe SSDs. They are available both on their own and bundled with our M.2 HAT+ as ready-to-use SSD Kits.
When we launched Raspberry Pi 5, almost exactly a year ago, I thought the thing people would get most excited about was the three-fold increase in performance over 2019’s Raspberry Pi 4. But very quickly it became clear that it was the other new features – the power button (!), and the PCI Express port – that had captured people’s imagination.
We’ve seen everything from Ethernet adapters, to AI accelerators, to regular PC graphics cards attached to the PCI Express port. We offer our own low-cost M.2 HAT+, which converts from our FPC standard to the standard M.2 M-key format, and there are a wide variety of third-party adapters which do basically the same thing. We’ve also released an AI Kit, which bundles the M.2 HAT+ with an AI inference accelerator from our friends at Hailo.
512GB variant256GB variant
But the most popular use case for the PCI Express port on Raspberry Pi 5 is to attach an NVMe solid-state disk (SSD). SSDs are fast; faster even than our branded A2-class SD cards. If no-compromises performance is your goal, you’ll want to run Raspberry Pi OS from an SSD, and Raspberry Pi SSDs are the perfect choice.
The entry-level 256GB drive is priced at $30 on its own, or $40 as a kit; its 512GB big brother is priced at $45 on its own, or $55 as a kit. Both densities offer minimum 4KB random read and write performance of 40k IOPS and 70k IOPS respectively. The 256GB SSD and SSD Kit are available to buy today, while the 512GB variants are available to pre-order now for shipping by the end of November.
So, there you have it: a cost-effective way to squeeze even more performance out of your Raspberry Pi 5. Enjoy!
Today we’re happy to announce a couple of new accessories that we think will make a big difference to your experience with Raspberry Pi. With the latest release of Raspberry Pi OS, Raspberry Pi 5 can make use of the extra performance available from Class A2 SD cards; to help you take advantage of this, we are introducing our own range of high-quality, low-cost Raspberry Pi SD Cards. And we’re releasing the Raspberry Pi Bumper, a cute little silicone cover to protect the base and edges of your Raspberry Pi 5.
Raspberry Pi SD Cards
As many of you will know first-hand, your choice of SD card makes a huge difference to your Raspberry Pi experience. Historically, we’ve worked with our Approved Reseller partners to test and endorse third-party SD cards. But as cards have become more sophisticated, and particularly with the advent of Class A2 cards, this process has become increasingly cumbersome.
To ensure you have the best possible experience at the lowest possible cost, we’ve worked with our partner Longsys to develop a range of branded Raspberry Pi SD Cards. These Class A2 cards offer exceptional random read and write throughput across the entire range of Raspberry Pi computers, and when used on Raspberry Pi 5 support command queueing for even higher performance.
From today, our Approved Resellers will only promote Raspberry Pi SD Cards alongside Raspberry Pi computers, and you can be assured of their quality.
Class A2 SD Cards: harder, better, faster, stronger
SD cards which support Application Performance Class A2, such as our new Raspberry Pi SD Cards, enable faster read and write operations, and Raspberry Pi 5 incorporates hardware features which allow it to make the most of this extra performance. To enable these features, you will need to use the latest release of Raspberry Pi OS, or update your Raspberry Pi OS install with the latest packages. Run the following command to update:
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade
How exactly do Class A2 cards achieve better performance? Read on!
What is CQHCI?
The SD Host Controller Interface (SDHCI) specification standardises the piece of hardware (the host controller) which controls communication with the SD card. On Raspberry Pi computers, the host controller lives inside the Broadcom application processor. The Command Queueing Host Controller Interface (CQHCI) extends SDHCI with an extra set of control registers, and a CQ engine which takes over from the legacy host controller when a suitable card is detected.
Cards must be explicitly put into command queueing (CQ) mode, after which a new set of SD commands becomes available and many of the existing SD commands become invalid. The new commands decouple the request to read or write a card sector from the response of the card. Each read or write operation is tagged, with up to 32 tags in use across both reads and writes. The card can choose the order in which it returns responses to the commands, and may optionally buffer write data rather than committing it immediately to flash.
By allowing it to effectively “see into the future”, command queueing lets the flash controller hide more of the latency associated with accessing disparate NAND flash pages. This results — at least in theory — in better throughput for random I/O workloads of the sort generated by Raspberry Pi OS.
CQ support first landed in eMMC devices with JEDEC specification JESD84-B51, in 2015. The SD specification equivalent landed some time later with SD v6.00, in 2017. However, at the time of the Raspberry Pi 5 launch in 2023, Linux only supported CQHCI on eMMC devices — so we were leaving performance on the table.
In early 2024 I set about implementing the missing CQ support for SD cards.
How do you use CQHCI?
Carefully parsing the SD specification led me to develop a dependency chain of optional card features that all needed to be supported if CQ mode is to be used. These are, in order:
The card must support Extension Register access, which is a generic method of accessing optional features over 512-byte pages, each with a type identifying to what feature extension the page refers
The card must support the Performance Enhancement extension registers
In the Performance Enhancement extension, the card must support Write Caching
As a consequence of Write Caching support, the card must also support the Power extension registers and at a minimum support Power-Off notifications
The card must declare the queue depth required to meet Class A2 performance — from 2 to 32 tags
As Linux already supported CQ with eMMC cards, all I had to do was to find out where the SD implementation differed — and there were a few of these cases.
During normal operation the host operating system sometimes needs to issue “meta-ops” that don’t directly transfer data but do related things, such as recalibrating the host-to-card data path delays, requesting card status as a proxy for card removal, and doing flash maintenance operations such as signalling block discard.
For eMMC devices, most meta-ops are performed by issuing command CMD6 with a 32-bit argument. CQHCI supports injecting these while in CQ mode by designating the “top” tag in the controller for performing DCMDs (direct commands). However, with SD cards, the set of commands performing meta-ops generally require us to halt the CQ engine, and issue a non-CQ command using the regular SD host controller registers.
Once these differences were ironed out, I had a workable Linux driver, which was pushed to rpi-update. I created a testing thread in the forums for the adventurous, and set about evaluating my extensive collection of retail cards.
How well do SD cards implement CQ mode?
In a very hit-and-miss fashion.
SanDisk cards, in particular the Extreme and Extreme Pro product lines, were my first choice — and they performed well. However, other manufacturers’ offerings suffered from one or more of a number of common deficiencies that precluded CQ mode operation, or caused them to flake out in use:
Not declaring Power-Off notification support despite implementing the extension
Hanging on receipt of a cache flush request after CQ mode had been activated then deactivated
Cards not correctly implementing the “CQ enable” expansion register bit — if I wrote a 1, I would still read back 0 forever
There was even one type of card that claimed Class A2 support but ignored any request to read the expansion registers to probe for any of these features!
The Raspberry Pi kernel filters out cards that fail these tests, either during feature probing or with an explicit quirk that matches the card identifier. If you find an A2-branded card that misbehaves on a Raspberry Pi 5, then please report it in the above-mentioned forum thread.
Write caching + surprise removal = badness
One potential pitfall of enabling CQ mode was that it provides cards with new opportunities to corrupt your filesystem if power is removed unexpectedly. In CQ mode, hosts should honour the requirement to maintain the card’s power supply, and only remove it after a Power-Off notification is sent; this provides an opportunity for the flash controller to commit all outstanding writes to flash. For battery-powered hosts with concealed SD slots such as a phone, that is an easy contract to fulfil — requesting device shutdown or uncovering the slot can trigger a Power-Off notification. Raspberry Pi, with its exposed SD slot and pluggable PSU, has a harder time providing this guarantee.
With multiple writes in flight, or multiple posted notifications of pending writes, we can no longer guarantee the order in which writes get committed to flash. If power is removed unexpectedly, an arbitrary collection of recent writes may not have been committed, rather than strictly the n most recent writes; this greatly complicates the task of making the filesystem resilient to corruption. The Raspberry Pi kernel sidesteps this problem by limiting the maximum number of posted writes in CQ mode to one. While in theory this may result in lower sequential write throughput, the cards I’ve tested see at most a 2–3% percent reduction in performance.
Introducing Longsys
Once it became clear that Class A2 SD cards offer a significant performance uplift when operating in CQ mode on Raspberry Pi 5, we started discussions with several card OEMs, with the goal of qualifying a cost-effective offering that would work well across every generation of Raspberry Pi computer.
We settled on Longsys as our vendor after working with their engineering team to align their cards’ declared feature sets with our requirements; to prove that the cards were robust by automatically performing over 100,000 surprise power cycles under I/O heavy load; and to tune the cards to get the best out of Raspberry Pi 5.
While best performance on Raspberry Pi 5 was our primary goal, the non-CQ performance of these cards is still stonkingly fast, and you will generally see a significant uplift in performance on older Raspberry Pi computers.
Raspberry Pi Bumper for Raspberry Pi 5
Today’s other accessory launch brings you the Raspberry Pi Bumper: the simple casing solution you never knew you needed, and already a firm favourite here at Pi Towers. It’s a snap-on silicone base that unfussily protects the base and edges of your Raspberry Pi 5, and the surface you’re putting it down on, and also makes it easier to use the power button. It’s compatible with the Raspberry Pi Active Cooler, and will set you back a meagre $3.
And there you are. Two unglamorous, yet excellent, accessories that we wonder how we managed without. We hope you like them.
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