I have installed the latest coreelec image onto an external ssd to usb3 drive with rufus.
I’m having no luck getting it to boot. Iv tried all four usb 3 ports. Iv tried with or without the emmc / micro sd present. Iv had success booting of emmc and micro sd so far, but no luck from usb3 external ssd.
Is there anything I am missing? Do I need to configure my emmc in a way as to allow “boot” from the external drive?
I did manage to get petitboot to load! I had made a change to the boot order, but it was actually not correct. When I try to reboot It no longer gets me into petitboot. I tried deleting the spiboot.img on the drive and re-placing it. This did not help me get back to the petit boot menu. I made sure the switch is in spi.
Is there something I’m missing? How can I get back to petitboot? I can’t figure it out.
Before updating the SPI flash memory, flip the boot select switch to MMC and do power cycle. Once you have updated, remove the power cable as well as MMC and flip back the boot select switch to SPI. If everything is ok, you can have Petitboot.
Download the file and copy it to your MMC card as spiboot.img before reboot, then Petitboot will load and update itself. Do not flip the boot select switch to MMC, keep at SPI. Once everything is done, on next reboot you will see the new version 20190705 and it will load from SSD.
Everything is up and running now! Booting from my ssd thru usb 3 !!
Thanks again for all the help!
One small note for any one interested,
The performance is much worse than emmc. In fact kodi bogs down quite easily on the ssd via USB.
I ran i/o benchmark in kodi, and it shows performance as slightly worse than the emmc.
I also copied a large file within each drive. The emmc performs at a rock solid fixed 45-147 MBps, while the SSD starts at 230 for about 1 second then drops to 100 quickly, then down to 60, back up to 100, etc.
Not sure if this is a limitation of usb 3 or my ssd?
I’m using the Samsung evo 840, which isn’t bad.
Looking at odroids own data, it shows usb 3 theoretical 4k/16k/512k as slightly better than emmc.
If you boot from eMMC,using your SSD as a plain external drive, do you get a performance increase when copying to the SSD?
And just to make another potentially useful comparison, carry out the same file copy test with the SSD connected to a port on your PC.
The N2 specs show the use of a GL3523 USB 3.0 controller, which looks good on paper.
As a slight aside, I reckon that it would be great if you packed all the information into a step by step guide and posted it onto the Guides and How-tos section of the forum for others to follow for future use.
Connect the SSD to your PC through the USB 3.0 port and test the average copy speed of your chosen large file. This just verifies that the transfer speed is capable of meeting your expectation.
Then boot the N2 from eMMC, connecting the SSD through one of the USB 3.0 ports and carry out the same test of copying the same chosen large file from eMMC to SSD (t might even be potentially useful to test the copy from all 4 USB 3.0 ports).
It gives you a baseline from which to start further testing and can help to immediately reduce the potential culprit(s), in this case, your SSD/Connection combo.