Hey everyone,
Been thinking about picking up a Rock Pi 4 for a small project. The idea is pretty simple, plug a pendrive into the board’s USB3 host port and have it show up as a normal drive when I connect it to a Windows PC through the USB3 OTG port. Read-only if possible too, using blockdev --setro along with g_mass_storage’s ro=1 option.
I’ve been through a bunch of old threads, and it’s clear g_mass_storage works fine on this board when you’re exporting a disk image file, like an .img sitting on the eMMC or an NVMe drive. What I can’t track down anywhere is someone doing it with an actual pendrive plugged in, passing the raw device straight through instead of a file.
So I wanted to ask a few things here.
Has anyone tried this with a real drive instead of an image? Did it just show up normally in Explorer on the Windows side?
Did anything odd happen with a physical device that wouldn’t happen with a file, auto-mount stepping in, needing to unmount the drive first, stuff like that?
Also wondering about speed. Does it actually run at USB3 on the OTG port, or does it usually drop down to USB2? I’ve seen mixed reports on that. And is the OTG switch finicky for other people too, or does it just work once you flip it?
One more thing, does it matter if I go with Model A or Model B? They seem to have the same OTG setup either way, but I wanted to check in case there’s some difference I’m missing.
If anyone’s actually built something like this, would love to hear how it went. Thanks!