The Jetson Xavier NX is more sophisticated than it’s earlier predecessor, the Jetson Nano. The NX has an NVMe connector on the bottom of the support board for NVMe SSDs. In this post, I install, format, and mount a Western Digital WD_Black SN750 250GB NVMe SSD.

The SSD is extremely easy to add to the NX.

1. Using a small Phillips head screwdriver, remove the screw on the left beneath the screw that is holding in the WiFi/Bluetooth adapter.
2. Insert the slotted end of the SSD into the matching connector on the right of the NX board, at a 45° angle up from the board, and push gently until the slotted end snaps into the socket.
3. Push down the other end of the SSD so that its left edge semi-circular hole lines up with the hole on the NX board right beneath it.
4. Re-install the small Phillips head scew so that it physically holds the SSD down in place.

At this point the SSD should be flat against NX board.

Now comes the formatting and mounting of the SSD to make is usable to the NX system.

1. Power up the NX and log into Ubuntu as your regular user.
2. Open a shell on the desktop and execute gnome-disks. Make sure that the entry as shown below is selected. On the gear button, click and select “Format Partition…”
3. You can type just about any standard ASCII character and number sequence for volume name. I chose WD250 because it was short and descriptive to me. I took the defaults for everything else. Click ‘Next’.
4. On the ‘Confirm Details’ dialog click the ‘Format’ button.
5. In the next dialog, type in your password, the same password you would use for any sudo command. Then hit Enter.
6. When you return back to the initial application view, you’ll see a new right arrow button. You’ll click this to mount the newly formatted disk.
7. When everything is finished, the gnome-disks application will show the size in decimal GB (not base-2), the device name (dev/nvme0n1 in this example), the UUID of the device, and the mount point of the drive (/media/jnx/WS250 in this example).

You’ll note that gnome-disks shows both the new 250GB drive and another 500GB SSD, Crucial MX500. This is the drive I purchased some time back for my Raspberry Pi 4, and which I “carried forward” to use with my Jetson Nanos. It’s big and fast for what I need. But I was curious to see how it’s speed compared to the new NVMe drive, so I ran some very basic (some would say crude) tests to write data to both drives and time how long the writes took. Again, let me state this is a very rough order of magnitude.

I used the utility ‘dd’ to write a 1GB file to both devices. Writes are a good 40% faster to the NVMe the the 500GB SSD, which is attached via a SATA to USB3 adapter.

So what are the overall benefits of replacing an external USB3 SATA SSD with the NVMe SSD?

1. The obvious first benefit is speed. For building and running models, the WD_Black is second to none.
2. The NVMe is a “real” drive. The boot device on the NX is a SanDisk 128GB micro SDXC memory card. It’s great for booting, but quite lousy with regards to speed.
3. With the NVMe I get back a USB3 port on the NX. I’ve also noticed a problem with the USB3 SATA adapter. It appears to cause interference and problems with any other attached USB device, especially my wireless keyboard.

I’m sure there are others. As far as cost is concerned I picked up the WD_Black from Amazon for $55. I find that to be an amazingly low price for a storage device of this type. While the NVMe is only 1/2 the storage space of the SATA device, I find that the new drive is more than enough for what I currently need.

A more complete and correct version of these instructions is here: /2020/05/31/building-and-running-jetson-inference-examples-on-the-jetson-xavier-nx-corrected/

These are directions for building and running the Jetson Inference examples on the Jetson Xavier NX running JetPack 4.4 Developer Preview. Jetson Inference was originally released for the Jetson Nano. It’s been a while since I worked with these examples on that platform, and I did not document anything, as it all seemed to work back then.

These are tl;dr instructions for guaranteed application building.

First, install the following packages:

sudo apt install libglew-dev qt5-default

Then clone a copy of Jetson Inference. You can do this anywhere, but do it in a part of the file system where you have normal (non-root) access.

git clone https://github.com/dusty-nv/jetson-inference.git

This will produce a new folder jetson-inference. Change directory into jetson-inference and execute the following git command.

git submodule update --init

Execute CMake to create the necessary build infrastructure.

cmake .

Then execute make.

make

Assuming you have all six NX cores enabled, and are building on an SSD (not the boot SDXC card), then it should build fairly quickly.

Now for the running part. As a very basic smoke test, attach a Raspberry Pi Camera Module V2 to the CAM0 port. That port is on the edge of the bottom circuit board right above the power barrel connector. You might want to power down the NX when you do this.

When you come back up change back to the jetson-inference folder, and then:

./aarch64/bin/camera-capture

You should see something on your desktop similar to the following screen capture.

The application, when running, will take over the entire desktop. The small window will allow you to set up the application for other tasks, and if you kill the window, then the entire application exits.

I’m in the process of testing out other features found in the Jetson Interface examples on the NX and will report anything untoward or unusual when time permits. My honeydew list is calling…