Using SSD with Android

[BakaMusuko]

I bought a NanoPC-T4 along with the remote control and a WD 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD. I intend to use this as a media player (and for some gaming) with my living room TV. Although I work a lot with Linux, in my opinion, Android makes for a better media player. When I fired up my new system, I was really impressed with how smooth and responsive it is with Android. Android runs great and the remote control is fantastic. My problem is that I cannot seem to access the SSD. It has been formatted as EXT4 with a GPT partition table. If I install Lubuntu, I can access it just fine. When I install Android, I cannot find it. Does anyone have any thoughts on what I might be doing wrong?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[jerryn]

I will be building up my NanoPC-T4 tomorrow. If Android on all media is the same then I believe you need to delete the partion you created on your SSD. Boot up Android, Go into Android Settings and setup the additional storage.
I've got a lot of projects for this board. The first one is build a replacement for my old NVIDIA Shield. It appears that
the NanoPC T4 will do a great job. Can you check the PlayStore to see if Plex and Plex Server are available ?

I'l like to get another board , cameras, and a servo controller.. test with ROS. This board was built to run ROS!
My current robot uses a TinkerBoard and a Core2-ROS. MIPI-CSI.. dual camera stereo tracking,robotics that's what this board was made for. I've got to contract friendly to see if the Robot Core V1.2 (made for rasberry pi) will work with the
nanopc-t4. I will just need to recompile the python libraries.

[jerryn]

ok. I loaded up android 8.1 on my NanoPC T4. Eflasher works great! I logged into my Google Play store accound, downloaded Plex, I couldn't download Plex Server, the store indicates it's incompatible with my device. I have a lifetime membership with them, I am going to check to see if there's a Beta Build that I can try.


Regarding NVMe storage. There's no Settings menu to allow to add NVME storage. Bummer.
I don't know who to ask to see if support for NVMe in android will be ready soon. I am sure they are working on it.


Moderator ... can you check on the status of NVME support for Android 8.1 ?

[jerryn]

According to Wikipedia, Android does not support NVMe. Android x86 7.1 had experimental support.. but that's for the x86 platform. No support in phones. Samsung has external NVMe storage, but it's connected to the phone via USBC.
I'm going to continue on with my testing. I've got a WD 8TB USB 3.0 drive. Not as fast as my 240GB NVMe but hey.. more storage and can experiment with the media center stuff, to see if I can replace my 1st gen NVIDIA Shield. So far.. so good

Maybe Friendly is writing a NVMe kernel module.

[jerryn]

They are working on NVMe support! I checked Github, there is code checked in! new code, 3 weeks old. Hopefully support will be in the new update soon!

[igorp]

Android is just "a shell". NVME support is kernel problem and it works there for some time. But if support is enabled in kernel that is part of the Android ... I don't know. Don't use it.

[jerryn]

Before I bought the nanoPC-t4 I browsed through the FriendlyArm Android 8.1 repository
NVMe support is in there. When I installed the OS on my device I looked through the device tree and did not see nvme
devices. I installed FriendlyDesktop and was able to format and mount my NVMe drive.
I verified my NVMe works with the NanoPC-T4, but Android 8.1 and 7 do not .

Are there any specific instructions to enable NVME in Android on the NanoPC-T4 ?

The reason why I'm using android is the VPU support on the FreeDesktop build is incomplete. VPU hardware
decoding does not work. glmark2-es scrores pretty well for such a small device. 1920x1080 socres a 58
If VPU worked I'd be a happy camper.