The new iHost will have USB 3.0 port.
SSD can be in many interfaces, like SAS, SATA and PCIe. When you say “connect an SSD drive directly to the board”, which specific interface do you mean?
By the way, what do you want to do with SSD? Using it as boot device? or just storage device?
Just like that - a boot device.
As a boot device and memory. PCle interface.
@jam3 @ociepa.ekotox Can I ask why do you want to use SSD as boot device? For the PCIe speed and storage capacity? I know SSD is far more superior than SD/TF card, but it’s not that much better than build-in eMMC.
For the speed comparion: PCIe 2.0/2.1 support 4Gbps max (Raspberry Pi 5 has one PCIe port), eMMC 5.1 support 2Gbps max (new iHost will have it).
Would it be better to have the ability to install whatever Linux OS you want to eMMC?
Regarding to storage, 32GB build-in eMMC? or even bigger 64GB? with the USB 3.0 port to further extends the storage capacity?
By the way, the Rockchip SoC we are using doesn’t support booting from PCIe interface directly.
Moved this post to the iHost Open Source Project category. Thanks for your understanding!