Jetson TX2 - Install SSD

The 32Gb eMMC capacity of the Jetson TX2 is not sufficient to install and test various machine learning frameworks and data. The Jetson Nano can do a variety of tests by replacing the sd card, but the eMMC on the Jetson TX2 is not easy to replace. Therefore, increasing the capacity of the storage device is a great help. In this article, we'll add an SSD to the Jetson TX2 and use it as a workspace in the future.
The next video from JetsonHacks will help you install an SSD.

SSD connection 

Prepare SSD

We will use a SATA SSD. Prepare SATA SSD and SATA cable as follows.

Connect SSD to TX2

TX2 board has a SATA slot. Power off the TX2 and connect the SATA cable to the slot.

Then power on the TX2.

Configuration

Follow these steps.


Run Disk utility.

You can see the SSD that you connected. In this picture, I connected ADATA's 120GB SSD that I was using on the Windows. My SSD  already has many partitions. So press "-" button and delete all partitions. If you use a new SSD, there may be no "-" button appears.

 Now all partitions are cleared.

Then format the 120GB SSD. Press the gear button and select format menu.

 Enter the volume name you like and file system (EXT4).

Now the new SSD is ready to use.

The final step is to permanently mount the new SSD.

cd /
sudo mkdir work
vim /etc/fstab

The fstab file looks like this.

# <file system> <mount point>             <type>          <options>                               <dump> <pass>
/dev/root            /                     ext4           defaults                                     0 1
/dev/sda1            /work                 ext4           defaults                                     0 1

Now reboot the TX2 system and check the file system.

spytx@spytx-desktop:~/Pictures$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p1   28G   13G   14G  49% /
none            3.8G     0  3.8G   0% /dev
tmpfs           3.9G  4.0K  3.9G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           3.9G   21M  3.9G   1% /run
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda1       110G   61M  104G   1% /work
tmpfs           786M   12K  786M   1% /run/user/120
tmpfs           786M  104K  786M   1% /run/user/1000

Yes, you can now mount a 110GB SSD in the /work directory.

Wrapping up

The Jetson TX2 is not easy to replace, so adding storage, such as an SSD, is quite useful.
In the future, many machine learning packages will need to be installed on a single storage device. We will use the Python virtual environment to make it easier to avoid failures due to interference between packages. However, in case of OpenCV which is used commonly in most packages, it can be used in common. For installing OpenCV 4.1.1 on Jetson TX2, see the following article(https://spyjetson.blogspot.com/2019/11/jetson-tx2-opencv-411-upgrade.html).