Pi booting to HDD

Hello All!

I have over then last week or so now got the system to boot directly to a HDD This is in a cradle with a USB connection plugged in to the Pi (3B+).

I want to streamline this a bit so all is in one box and have placed an order with Aliexpress for :

Raspberry Pi 3 B+ HDD storage expansion board X830 3.5" Sata. [ This allows a 3.5" drive sata drive to connect to a Pi via Sata -> USB connection. ]

Link for prod :

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30-3-5-SATA-HDD/32882121176.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.79914c4dSHLuDX

Raspberry Pi X830 3.5" Sata storage board matching metal case/enclosure + power control switch and cooling fan.

Link for prod :

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rd-Matching-M etal-Case-Enclosure-Power-Control/32898884156.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.79914c

4dSHLuDX

You need both lines of these links.

The problem seem to be what is needed for the Power adaptor as there are quite a few. As the x830 shows one saying 14-40vdc, 3A then offfering a 19V 2A which needless to say only has an EU or US plug using a DC Power Plug Size : 5.5*2.5mm.

In the questions section on the Metal case some one asks if a laptop adaptor giving 19V

3.42A is ok and they report yes.

So the question is what one as I feel that the basic one 19V 2A is under powered as I would like it to run both the x830 / HDD and the pi.

The HDD does mention using 5V (0.5A) and 12V (0.7A). The caddy is 12V at 2A but that is only running the caddy.

Any one have any recommendations as my brain is hurting ?

The docs on the X830 and for that matter the Pi is not detailed enough for me to work it out or I am just getting too old,

Vince

Reply to
Vince Coen
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Simply get any 2.5" portable disk. It won't need external power. Make sure you use the official RPi power adapter for the Pi, though.

Reply to
A. Dumas

A. Dumas wrote, on 08-01-2019 08:18:

E.g. this is my home server running happily for more than a year now. No SD card.

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Reply to
A. Dumas

Hello A!

Wednesday January 09 2019 08:12, you wrote to Fred Smith:

I have decided touse a laptop ps that gives 19v at 3.43w and hopefully can even use it to power the Pi as well - have to look when the kit arrives from Singapore in 10

- 20 days.

The drive is one of a few spare 1 Tb among many others so I do wish to make use of one or more and not use a USB external which I use for back ups only.

Vince

Reply to
Vince Coen

Even then I'd be using an externally, separately powered disk. The pi simply does not have the grunt to run "any 2.5" portable disk" reliably. You are asking for all sorts of obscure problems that will ruin your day.

Reply to
Fred Smith

All modern 2.5" portable disks say they require no external power, that means they adhere to the common denominator usb2 standard of 5 V and max.

500 mA. The Pi does too, it can even go to 1 A with the right setting in /boot/config.txt. So, any 2.5" portable disk will do. I have 3 different ones and they all work fine without the 1 A setting.

... There *might* be 2.5" disks who draw more than 1 A peak current at startup. Those are almost certainly not disks you can buy in the shops today.

Reply to
A. Dumas

I run a Raspberry Pi 3B with a 2.5" portable disk just fine.

Initially I had power problems, but those weren't solved by using a second power adapter on a Y-cable to the disk. Instead, that made it unstable, probably by "backfeeding".

The solution was to use a short (15 or 30 cm) USB power cable with thick (18 AWG) power leads.

Search for "15cm 0.5FT Micro B USB Fast Quick Charge Cable 2.1A Android SmartPhone 18AWG" on eBay or other sites. They are not the cheapest, but work very well.

Most USB cables have too thin leads and are too long, resulting in a considerable voltage drop. Also, the Pi itself only has very small buffer capacitors, so peaks in power consumption cause voltage drops, and the dreaded yellow thunderbolt on the screen. With the short, thick power cables, the regulator in the power adapter can follow the demand more closely.

In my opinion, even the official RPi power adapter is marginal. Not because of its capacity, but the power cable could be better.

--
Kind Regards, 
Kees Nuyt
Reply to
Kees Nuyt

On Wed, 09 Jan 2019 13:05:13 +1300, snipped-for-privacy@f1.n50.z2.binkp.net (Vince Coen) declaimed the following:

You're going to need some sort of voltage regulation to drop that 19V down to a level most equipment wants. The input of the R-Pi is 5V (as are the BeagleBone Black, Arduinos, TIVAs, etc.). Going much above those levels will either damage the board, or cause very hot running if they have on-board regulation.

I suspect most "full size" drives are either 12V or 5V (probably depending upon connector). A "Best Buy" drive enclosure I have uses 12V@2A wall wart barrel jack and a USB-3 connector for data (not power). .

--
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN 
	wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/
Reply to
Dennis Lee Bieber

19V

Solid state converters are easy to find on eBay.

For years I drove the PNA (Personal Navigational Assistant, or pocket satnav) in my glider off the sort you used to find that fit the cigarette lighter in a car. When that failed after 10 years or so I picked up a much meatier unit off eBay (12-22v in, 5v out at up to 3A) which works just fine.

There are lots of these on eBay for under GBP 5, some already fitted with a USB 2 socket and some advertising themselves a perfect for driving an RPi. The ones without a USB socket all have decent, thick wire on the output side.

Apparently they were originally sold to power the LEDs 'da kidz' liked to decorate their cars with.

--
Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org
Reply to
Martin Gregorie

The board the O/P has purchased looks like it takes in power on a barrel connector, has on board regulators to supply the 12v/5v to hard drive and 5.1v to the Pi.

Reply to
Andy Burns

ure

I don't know why you would even consider a conventional disc with a Raspberry Pi, they are power hungry and slower than SD cards for small random access transfers, due to latency.

On the other hand an SSD has great random access performance, and has no

power issues. It's not even like its expensive - a band new SanDisk

n a SanDisk 128GB SD card.

---druck

Reply to
druck

Hello druck!

Wednesday January 09 2019 20:10, you wrote to A. Dumas:

A SSD has its own issues using Linux - garbage collection as the cheaper one use a poor controller that requires long idle times (6-=8 hours) to process.

The only brand I have found so far that does work (with running fstrim each night) is Samsung 850, 950,960 series and they are not that cheap and I have a lot of spare DASDs ranging from 320Gb to 1Tb available.

I have on the Pi a BBS and web, apache and ftp servers although most if not all are inactive.

The Pi does a rsync to the primary system every 6 hours and updates itself with current files for the BBS which has a file base of over 15GB ( have not check in a few years but growing every month). This keeps the Pi in sync most of the time :)

So if the primary system is offline I can activate the Pi to take over and this is a manual start up of services as the Ram available as well as the cpu power is not strong enough to handle load at least with me doing any work on it such as various applications including a pilots log book and a accounting (sales, purchase,stock etc) application to just name two.

These are also back up systems.

After all having spent big bucks (OK pounds) on it I am not having it sitting idle. No that was not the reason for getting it but to run a specific Cobol compiler that is only free when run on a Pi. This is for development experimentation only.

Vince

Reply to
Vince Coen

For me: speed is not an issue, power not a limiting factor, I wanted a 1 TB drive, prices were much different 1-2 years ago.

Also generally, SSD is still like Flash, albeit much better managed and larger and with larger spare space, hopefully. I don't know how much worse it is (i.e. if it's more like an SD card) if you get a small, bargain basement SSD.

Reply to
A. Dumas

I've used car/truck cigarette lighter adaptors for years. Usually, I pull out the guts and put it in my case with the Pi. The truck ones are 12-24V input.

More recently, I tried some cheap DC DC buck converters from Amazon/Ebay. They work, but they generate so much RF noise the WiFi was unable to work on the Pi. None had any output filtering other than just the single electrolytic capacitor. Even with adding some filtering, I couldn't get WiFi working. Went back to a car cigarette lighter adaptor, which works fine. (A friend told me some of the car adaptors have bad RF radiation too - he used them in a glider to power a GPS, and you would get the odd bad one which killed the GPS signal.)

--
Andrew Gabriel 
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]
Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

Same here, mainly so I could use soldered 12v connections rather than the horrible alternative of using cigar lighter socket on a flying lead and strapping the converter in with insulation tape so it couldn't leap out of its socket at an awkward motive. I also put the lot into a metal box (rather than plastic) to limit RF noise from it and (paranoia!) added ferrite cores to its input and output cables.

The 12v -> 5v@3A converter I'm currently using was bought because the cigar-lighter converters have vanished from eBay. Its installed inside the same metal box that used to contain the old converter and with the same ferrite cores on the external wiring. Again, no RF interference despite being mounted less than 10 cm from my glider's airband transceiver.

I never saw that - probably because I thought it might be an issue and put it inside said metal box.

FWIW the only bad source of RF I've had came from the mechanical turn&bank I carry when it was first fitted. That was silenced by putting a capacitor across its power leads: one that Maplins sold specially for suppressing sparking from motor commutators & brushes. Fitting it immediately got rid of all the noise.

--
Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org
Reply to
Martin Gregorie

Good point, but I don't think its a problem with a Raspberry Pi that isn't writing gigabytes a day to the disc. I'd just recommend ensuring you have about 40% to 50% free space, and controller wear levelling should work fine.

Running a BBS should be mostly reads, and a bit of writes for updates and logging. Ideal for a SSD.

---druck

Reply to
druck

There are a lot of cheap SSDs with names I've never heard of, which I would avoid. I suspect some are just an SD card in a 2.5" case!

I picked up a second hand Kingston SSD to go in an ancient netbook as it only had an SATA2 interface - it wasn't that much quicker than the spinning rust it replaced.

For cheap small SSDs I'd use SanDisk, and larger ones Samsung.

---druck

Reply to
druck

I have one in my car. It wipes out the distant FM station I often listen to.

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Reply to
Charlie Gibbs

Best ever buck/SM converters I came across were made for RC planes with interference an absolute nono.

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$15 is not cheap, but oh is it worth it.

There is a single cell to 5V (adjustable) one as well that upconverts.

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

My experience is different. I have 2 pi's, an RPI 3 and an RPI 1B+ running each with USB 2.5in HDD attached, powered from the RPIs. The rpi3 is a server and runs 24/7 and has for over a year. The B+ is a backup server which is switched on and off for backups by the RPI3. Neither has given me problems.

I have tried to run 2 USB HDDs from one Pi and had problems booting. But not investigated if it was an insufficient power supply or just the RPI not being able to deliver sufficient power via the USB ports.

My Pi's each have an SD card for the boot stuff, but the root filesystem is on the USB Hard drives. The SD cards boot partitions are mounted Readonly, so on a power fail they won't corrupt. Does mean you have to remember to re-mount r/w when you need to upgrade or change bootparams etc.

Reply to
Jim Jackson

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