Another option is to wipe the U-Boot from the SD-card and just use the SD-card only, no USB-adaptor needed. Then the only U-Boot in the system is the one in SPI-flash. I have done that once on an SBC with no SPI-flash but eMMC where the bootloader is stored. And that also involves GPT partitions and so on, not independent like SPI-flash. But as Werner says, backup is easy. For old 32-bit Armbians, I made some function in my unattended backup scripting to do that, so that after a year(s) or so, I can restore to get exactly the same system (when SD-card gets bad/broken for example).

Thanks for the guide - got my X96 Air back up and running after it died after running fine

@rm_ No, SD and NVME are working with Armbian edge 7.1, while USB does not. root@orangepirv2:~# uname -a Linux orangepirv2 7.1.0-rc3-edge-spacemit #3 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Sun May 10 21:08:09 UTC 2026 riscv64 GNU/Linux root@orangepirv2:~# blkid /dev/nvme0n1p1: LABEL="armbi_root" UUID="fdbd4ab2-2238-4a62-a079-74ff0582c8d2" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="00406d4f-01" /dev/mmcblk0p1: LABEL="armbi_root" UUID="63ee7593-e111-4547-ac2f-6bdb8519ce11" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="9ebf8299-01" /dev/zram0: UUID="3be872bc-b408-46c3-8ec9-d27500adc1dd" TYPE="swap" /dev/zram1: LABEL="log2ram" UUID="bace3aba-15ea-4833-a7ad-f7d9e39aa0c5" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" root@orangepirv2:~# lsusb root@orangepirv2:~# lspci 0001:00:00.0 PCI bridge: SpacemiT X60 PCIe 2.0 x2 Root Complex (rev 01) 0002:00:00.0 PCI bridge: SpacemiT X60 PCIe 2.0 x2 Root Complex (rev 01) 0002:01:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd NVMe SSD Controller PM9B1 (DRAM-less) (rev 02) Anyhow, thanks for the Phoronix link // Sven-Ola

@johlnx I will give it a try. The main reason i bought this board was to place it on my parrents house as a backup storage device. Thats why i wanted the 1 Gbps port. And i understand that i would never get 1Gbps lan -> disk transfer with encryption and such, but 100Mbps is 10 times less. I would be happy with 200Mbps or 300Mbps actual performance. without gigabit support its limited to 100Mbps 😕 And thanks for the reply on the github "The board lacks an external Gigabit PHY; the internal PHY supports only 4 lines, which limits the speed to 100 Mbps." I understand that its physicaly impossible. So im just saying "im sad" I can probably get more than 100Mbps using wifi

For microSD card slot to even work at all, it is listed as a change that landed only in 7.2. https://www.phoronix.com/news/SpacemiT-K1-K3-Linux-7.2 This is why you get root filesystem UUID not found with 7.0-7.1