Search Results for “SSD guide”

Radxa Zero Debian SSD Boot Guide

Published: February 17, 2023 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 6 Comments / Benchmarking, Hardware, Radxa SBCs, Storage

The Radxa Zero can definitely be set up to boot from USB storage / using a SSD. You can do this trick using both the eMMC and an SD card. Given that the board also has a quad-core processor you can actually make a tiny and pretty powerful server setup with something like this achieving pretty impressive I/O speeds for such a small package.

In this guide I’ll show you how to set up SSD booting on the Radxa Zero using their official Debian operating system. Let’s get started!

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StarFive VisionFive 2 Official Debian SSD Boot Guide

Published: January 23, 2023 / Last Modified: April 1, 2023 / 39 Comments / Hardware, RISC-V, Storage

The StarFive VisionFive 2 comes with a M.2 M-key PCIe 2.0 slot that we can use with a 2280 NVMe drive. Unfortunately at release it’s not possible to boot from the NVMe drive but this is expected to be added to the device through some combination of SPI+NVMe booting.

In the meantime we are going to bootstrap the boot process using a SD card and then clone that SD card to our SSD to be used as the root partition. This essentially will let us have our system’s root partition on the SSD (much faster).

Let’s get started!

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Orange Pi 5 NVMe/SATA SSD Boot Guide

Published: December 27, 2022 / Last Modified: March 31, 2023 / 155 Comments / Hardware, Orange Pi, Storage

The Orange Pi 5 has a nice M.2 NVMe slot but unfortunately most of the official images will not boot if you try to directly image a NVMe drive. Fortunately there is an easy way to get this working that people who frequent the blog will almost certainly have seen before.

We are going to bootstrap the boot process using a SD card and then clone that SD card to our SSD to be used as the root partition. This essentially will let us have our system’s root partition on the SSD (much faster).

Let’s get started!

Orange Pi 5 NVMe/SATA SSD Boot Guide Read More »

Radxa Rock Pi 4C Plus SSD Boot Guide

Published: October 31, 2022 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 43 Comments / Hardware, Radxa SBCs, Storage

The Rock Pi 4C Plus is a bit different to boot with a SSD than it’s predecessors. It does not have a SPI flash (nor can you solder one onto the board) so to use the NVMe slot for our root filesystem we need to use a SD card as the boot loader.

In this guide I’ll walk you through the process to clone a working SD card installation to your NVMe drive and then use some tricks with the drive’s UUID identifiers and essentially pass the boot process off from the SD card and have the NVMe SSD take over.

Let’s get started!

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Libre “Renegade” SSD Booting Guide

Published: October 14, 2022 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 31 Comments / Benchmarking, Hardware, Libre SBCs, Storage

Libre Computers "Renegade" SSD Boot Guide

The “Renegade” by Libre Computers is a $50 single board computer. You actually get USB 3.0 with the “Renegade” which is going to make it even more worth it to use a SSD with than the “Le Potato”.

This method requires a sacrificial SD card to serve as the bootloader. After booting though it will use your SSD for the system’s root filesystem. We will then benchmark it to measure the improvement/gains.

In this guide I’ll walk you through the process. Let’s get started!

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Libre “Le Potato” SSD Boot Guide

Published: October 6, 2022 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 14 Comments / Benchmarking, Hardware, Libre SBCs, Storage

The “Le Potato” by Libre Computers is a $40 single board computer. That is incredibly cheap in 2022 as anyone who has tried to buy a Raspberry Pi recently can tell you. There aren’t a lot of guides out there for how to best utilize it though so today I’d like to publish a guide for it for one of the best upgrades you can do with any SBC: upgrade to SSD storage!

Let’s begin!

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ODROID XU4/XU4Q SSD Booting Guide

Published: October 5, 2022 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 27 Comments / Benchmarking, Hardware, ODROID, Storage

The ODROID XU4 and XU4Q can be a bit more tricky to boot from USB drives such as a SSD due to them not using the fantastic Petitboot bootloader like many of their newer boards have. It is still completely achievable though using an old trick and a sacrificial SD card.

The performance gains as well as access to much higher capacity drives can makes it more than worth it to set up SSD storage (as it is on nearly all single board computers).

Let’s get started!

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Tinker Board SSD / USB Booting Guide

Published: October 4, 2022 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 25 Comments / Benchmarking, Hardware, Storage, Tinker Board

I recently wrote a getting started guide for the Tinker Board as even though the newer models tend to be quite expensive the older models can often be found for a lot cheaper. In this guide we are going to do something more advanced and are going to actually move our root filesystem to a SSD!

I have the original variant (the Tinker Board 1 S) and that is what I will be using for this guide but this should work on all Tinker Boards (including models without the eMMC). The Tinker Board 2 will have faster performance as the USB ports are USB 3.0 vs. USB 2.0 on the original Tinker Board. If you don’t have the S model with the eMMC this method will require a sacrificial SD card to serve as the bootloader.

This is an old method that I first covered for the Raspberry Pi before it supported native USB booting. I’ve also covered it here for the Orange Pi Zero 2. The SD card/eMMC serves as the bootloader but our root filesystem will be on the SSD. This is a fantastic method for any board that doesn’t natively support booting the OS from a USB storage device.

Let’s begin!

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Orange Pi Zero 2 USB SSD Boot Guide

Published: August 30, 2022 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 30 Comments / Benchmarking, Hardware, Orange Pi, Storage

During my recent coverage of SBCs I’ve been benchmarking them using SSDs. The process for booting from a SSD varies across different boards. I’ve found the documentation for some of these to be lacking / nonexistent and the Orange Pi Zero 2 is one of these.

Today I wanted to benchmark the Orange Pi Zero 2 with the SSD and given the lack of documentation I’m going to document my process for setting it up. The Orange Pi Zero 2 will require a sacrificial SD card to bootstrap the process and has USB 2.0 ports. With those limitations in mind let’s set it up and see how it performs!

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ODROID N2+ Petitboot SSD Boot Guide

Published: August 29, 2022 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 39 Comments / Benchmarking, Hardware, ODROID, Storage

Configuring the ODROID N2+ for USB booting can be a little bit tricky. There are guides out there that will both use a SD card to bootstrap the SSD booting and other guides that use Petitboot but have complex setup instructions.

Today I want to show you a simple method that I used to get SSD booting set up on the ODROID N2+ so I could perform my storage benchmarking on the device for my review. I will be using a NVMe SSD but you may use other types of SSDs as well. Let’s get started!

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Search Results for: SSD guide