Replacing the Micro SD Card with a USB Drive (SSD) for Jetson Nano 2GB

Hello,

I was thinking to have a 2.5" SATA SSD 250GB (Crucial MX500) to replace the Micro SD card on my Jetson Nano 2GB. But for now, I am not sure either this is a good decision or not, since I am quite new to this field of study.

Thus, I have a few questions as listed below;

  • Is it possible for the Jetson Nano 2GB to boot from the USB drive? Currently, I am using JetPack 4.5.

  • Is there any specific requirements for the SSD need to be? Such as NVMe, SATA, or other technical specifications.

  • Does using the SSD as a USB Drive may affect Jetson Nano performance? Such as, power draw or anything else.

  • Is there any guides on how to flash the JetPack onto the SSD? I try to read the document provided by NVIDIA at,

https://docs.nvidia.com/jetson/l4t/index.html#page/Tegra%20Linux%20Driver%20Package%20Development%20Guide/introduction.html#wwpID0E3HA

but… I didn’t manage to understand it properly.

I am sorry if this question have been appointed in previous topics, maybe a link attachment to those topics might help and will be appreciate.

Thank you.

Had the same problem with the official guide, so wrote my own which is fairly simple: Foolproof guide to move from microSD to USB SSD? - #6 by dirk.lueth

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Wow! This is amazing. Thank Your Dirk for the guide you provided.

So I will assume, there will be no problem for the Jetson Nano 2GB to boot-up from a USB Drive, since you manage to do it, right?.

Later, when my drive (SSD) arrived, I will have a try and update for more information here.

@faiz26 Mine is the 4GB version but it should be exactly the same for the 2GB version. And yes, it works perfectly the way I did it - and it is dead simple ;)

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Owh okay, I am so excited to have a try on my device. Again, thank you for the confirmation, much appreciated. =D

Though there is a solution here, I still want to know what difficulties do you hit when you read the developer guide?

We have a guidance for usb drive here.

https://docs.nvidia.com/jetson/l4t/index.html#page/Tegra%20Linux%20Driver%20Package%20Development%20Guide/flashing.html#wwpID0E0HM0HA

For me, there are a lot of terms that I didn’t understand. For example, GPT, eMMC, and others. This cause me to have less confidence to follow the guide there. When reading the documentation, I feel like ’ This is not for me '. So, I decide to seek for others help that might have better understanding on the instructions.

However it is not the provider fault, I admit it is just me for being lazy to do further research on what is the meaning of those terms and I also do not have proper background to this field of study. This is my first SBC and AI capable device and also my first experience with this kind of technology 😅.

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A video recently released by JetsonHacks on YouTube have answer this question. But must be on JetPack 4.5.1.