How to speedup your Orange Pi 4 / RK3399 with moving your root to USB3

Hi all,

Maybe there are a lot people who got this working but for me was today the day. I buyed a time a go a cheap but fast NVME SSD from Aliexpress. The smallest one a 128GB. I have also a 512GB in my laptop and for the price they are really good. But i needed also a USB-NVME external housing. That is the Ugreen NVME 10GBps to USB adapter.

In very short but i will explain more in the future.

1. Flash a MicroSD card with your favourite Armbian to the MicroSD. Update with sudo apt-get update.  Also with a SSH session not a problem.

2. Place the USB disk in a USB 3.0 port of the Orange Pi. By the OrangePi 4 it´s the blue one on the top.

3. run the command lsusb

4. Notice the dev id. In my situation it´s 174c:2362

5. Run the command with off course your dev id. Notice the :u at the end that must be added.

echo "174c:2362:u" | sudo tee /sys/module/usb_storage/parameters/quirks

6. Replug the USB drive. I see the activity led on the drive short flashing.

7. Run the following command

sudo nano /boot/armbianEnv.txt

8. Add the dev id after usbstoragequirks and close and save the file. By my system is the complete row:

usbstoragequirks=174c:2362:u,0x2537:0x1066:u,0x2537:0x1068:u

7. Logout and in with your root account! This is very important. With sudo is this not possible.

8. Open armbian-config. Select System->Update Bootloader-> Boot from SD, root from NVME/eMMC etc.

9. The tool will ask you the directory to the disk. Most of time is this standard correct. You get a question about the filesystem. Select EXT4. You get a warning that the disk would be erased. Click on Ok.

10. Wait patiently to finish

11. And without failures you could click reboot and boot from USB/NVME!

By my is the Orange:Pi a  lot faster! Booting, updating copy files. Everything. I am really happy with this!

Edited October 12, 20205 yr by Werner
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