SATA HDD & power supply

[Mirek H.]

Hi,

I've finally managed to have my cubieboard running with SATA HDD powered via the board! Nice!

The trick was in usage of two power sources at the same time; both barrel (router/firewall) and OTG (LCD monitor)

If I use only one power source (any of the four combinations) the OS boots fine, but my HDD is reset? (periodic tick tick tick... sound) every about 0.5s

This is something I can live with when using CB as mediacenter, but wouldn't work so well for e.g. torrent server.

I am curious if anybody managed to run CB with 2.5" SATA HDD (not SSD) using only single power source.

It really doesn't matter if this was barrel or OTG, just not both at the same time.

Thanks,

Mirek

P.S. I suspect the problem is with voltage rather then current - SATA voltage drops under some threshold making live for HDD difficult, but SSD is still fine.

But I don't have any easy way how to verify this (not a HW-man ;) so this can be just red herring...

some HW info

[   12.550000] ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 mmio [mem 0x01c18000-0x01c18fff] port 0x100 irq 56

[   15.590000] ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)

[   15.590000] ata1.00: ATA-8: HITACHI HTS725050A7E630, GH2ZB390, max UDMA/133

[   15.600000] ata1.00: 976773168 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)

[   15.600000] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133

[   15.640000] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      HITACHI HTS72505 GH2Z PQ: 0 ANSI: 5

[   15.650000] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 976773168 512-byte logical blocks: (500 GB/465 GiB)

[   15.650000] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 4096-byte physical blocks

[   15.680000] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off

[   15.720000] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00

[   15.720000] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA

[   15.840000]  sda: sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 sda5

[   15.840000] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk

http://www.tp-link.com/en/products/details/?model=TL-WR1043ND

[Bastiaan van den Berg]

On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 1:03 PM, Mirek H. <sirkadev....@gmail.com> wrote:

I am curious if anybody managed to run CB with 2.5" SATA HDD (not SSD) using only single power source.

Yeah, i am powering cubieboard from the USB port on a Motorola Lapdock. SATA hdd connected to cubieboard, works fine.

My SATA hdd seems to be very power efficient, 500mA max draw.

--

buZz