ODROID

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!

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!

I’ve covered eMMC modules on the site before as being a fantastic performance option. Today I received some Hardkernel eMMC modules that I wanted to do some performance testing to see how they perform as well as a guide for how to get started with them.

These are promised to be ready to go out of the box. I will test that claim and then we will do some performance benchmarking. No matter what happens we will also do a fresh reimage of the module to show the complete process of getting them set up. Let’s begin!