Hi everyone,

I'm building a local AI assistant on my Raspberry Pi 5 (16GB RAM) and I'm trying to figure out the best storage setup before my AI HAT+ 2 arrives.

My concern: the Pi 5 has a single PCIe FPC connector, so I'm not sure how to have both an NVMe SSD and the AI HAT+ 2 running at the same time.

I've looked at the Pineboards HatDrive AI which seems to stack NVMe + pass-through PCIe for the AI HAT, but I'd love to hear from people who have actually tried this combo.

Alternatively, I'm considering just using a USB 3.0 SATA SSD to avoid the PCIe conflict entirely — would that be fast enough for running Ollama models and a vector database?

My setup:

- Raspberry Pi 5 16GB

- Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2 (on the way)

- Planning to run: Ollama (Llama / Qwen), Home Assistant integration, Whisper STT, Piper TTS

Has anyone successfully combined NVMe + AI HAT+ 2 on Pi 5? Any recommended hardware?

Thanks!