Raspberry Pi 500+ Launches with 256GB NVME SSD and 16GB RAM

2025-09-25 | By Travis Foss

Single Board Computers Keyboards Keyboards Mice Raspberry Pi SBC

I am sure that by now, a good majority of you (over 340,000 of you, to be more exact) have seen the video by Jeff Geerling when the Pi 500 was launched. During the video, he pointed out some things that he wished were included with the Raspberry Pi 500, such as the M.2 slot, which was left unpopulated. Well, Raspberry Pi revealed today that they have been, behind the scenes, building these features into an updated version of the Pi 500. Today, they released the Pi 500+ and, along with the M.2 slot that fits the common 2230, 2242, 2260, and 2280 size M.2 SSDs, the Pi 500+ has several other new features that are hard to miss. First, the key switches used are custom Gateron KS-33 switches, which have a similar clicky sound and feel to that of Cherry Blue switches. Also, each switch has an independent RGB LED, meaning you have tons of glowing awesomeness. Along with the new external features, they have increased the size of the SDRAM to 16GB from the 8GB included with the Original Pi 500. They have also included a 256GB SSD, which is pre-loaded with Raspberry Pi OS.

Along with all the new features, the Pi 500+ is based on the 2.4GHz quad-core, 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 CPU, with 512KB L2 Caches and a 2MB shared L3 Cache. It also has a VideoCore VII GPU. It is capable of both 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11ac Wi-Fi, as well as Bluetooth 5.0 and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). For Inputs and outputs, the Pi 500+ has a micro-SD card slot, with support for high-speed SDR104 mode and the command queuing extension. It also has two USB 3.0 Ports, which support simultaneous 5Gbps operation, one USB 2.0 port, Gigabit Ethernet, Dual micro-HDMI ports, and a 40-pin GPiO header.

The Pi 500+ has been designed so that the keycaps can be replaced with alternative keycaps if the user so decides. For those of you who like the feel of a mechanical keyboard but not the noise, Raspberry Pi also introduced a key dampener kit, which consists of several O-rings that can be applied to the keys to dampen the noise.

There are a few different variants of the Pi 500+, consisting of a 78, 79, or 83-key version, depending on which regional variant the user chooses.

If you had previously investigated or are currently looking into the Pi500 and were hoping for a bit more pizazz, now is the perfect time to purchase the new Pi500+.

Raspberry Pi 500+ Unit only

Raspberry Pi 500+ Kits

In addition to the items listed below, each kit also includes an official Raspberry Pi Mouse 2 and a 2M micro-HDMI cable.

Official Accessories

Raspberry Pi 500+ dampener kit

Power supplies

Mice

HDMI to micro-HDMI cables

Monitors

MicroSD cards

NVME SSDs

To learn more about the Raspberry Pi 500+, check out the new product highlight here: www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/r/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-500

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