Orange Pi Zero 2W 1,5GB Boot procedure

Troubleshooting
1

For a new project, due to the unavailability of a Pi Zero 2W and the currently rather high prices of other Raspberry Pi models, I decided on an Orange Pi Zero 2W 1.5GB. I don’t have it yet, but it’s on its way. Compatibility with my favorite OS—DietPi—was important to me when making this choice. That’s definitely a given.

Since I struggled with two Banana Pis and a Nano Pi years ago and later came to appreciate the simplicity of the Raspberry Pi, I want to give it another try with a different model due to the issues mentioned above.

Long story short, there are really only 1–2 questions right now:

Can I boot the Orange Pi Zero 2W under DietPi from a storage medium other than an SD card? I was thinking of either a USB flash drive or a USB SSD.

But I just noticed that this Orange Pi doesn’t have USB 3.0 at all, which severely limits the performance of a flash drive or SSD. So, one could certainly argue about the practicality of my plan.

Still, here’s the question again: Do other storage devices work when booting with DietPi, or are a few “workarounds” needed to set that up?

2

When you move the bootloader to SPI, you could boot from there, but keep your system partition on USB, the u-boot bootloader supports that and this is a quite common scenario.

In theory u-boot also supports booting via PXE, and at least people succeeded to boot the OPi Zero this way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5FghgwySow