HardDrive on RPi

Hi,

I tried to use an hard drive on my RPi, but I am hitting different issues :
– The format procedure does not finish properly, I had to use a Beagleboard.
– When connected to the RPi, the harddrive is not seen after a cold boot.
– I have to do a warm reboot to see the drive
– When copying couple of Megabytes from the SD to the Harddrive, it crashes corrupting the Metadata of the FS.

I tried with different drive capacity and it is the same behavior no matter what.

I am surely missing something, but I have no clue what.

Thanks,

Franck

I have had a lot of problems trying to use a Fat32 formatted SSD on the RPi. It seems fine when attached, directories can be viewed etc. Small files can be loaded, saved etc, but as soon as any significant load is put on the system (viewing digital camera images, copying to drive large files) the system quickly freezes needing a power cycle to recover. I have tried three different make SSDs (all 110-120 GB) and three powered hubs. Everything works fine on ARMini and Iyonix in any combination, but not on the Rasp Pi. I have gone back to using ShareFS, which is rather slow on the Pi but more reliable. More investigation is needed when I have time.

Remember, USB isn’t exactly stable on the RPi. Wouldn’t be surprised if RISC OS is falling over when a USB disk disappears on it (whereas Linux can handle it more gracefully).

Are you running the HDD from a powered USB hub?

I was booting/running RISC OS from a USB HDD (and a SSD) several months ago before SDFS was available without any major issues.

A while back I was having issues getting a USB webcam working (This was under Linux) and tracked that down to the USB cable I was using to power the Raspberry Pi had a high voltage drop on it. Switching to a shorter cable resolved the instabilities I was seeing. So that’s also something worth checking.

(At one point I purchased a ‘tested on RPi’ USB cable.. That was even worse in terms of voltage drop with the RPi only getting 4.5V)

If I remember I’ll try connecting up a USB HDD tonight and see how that works on the latest release.

I had too problems to power an external HDD, (WD Passport 250GB), but after I shorted those darn polufyses everything is ok! I am using a 2.5A USB PSU…

I had too problems to power an external HDD, (WD Passport 250GB), but after I shorted those darn polufyses everything is ok!

Was that powering it directly from the onboard USB ports?

I’ve not bridged my polyfuses yet, but as my USB HDD enclosure uses two USB ports for power I had to use a hub regardless! (Unless I didn’t want a keyboard attached..)

HDD is powered from onboard USB! I use a short cable to connect the HDD to Rpi.

Every Rotating 2.5" HDD I’ve seen draws more than 0.5Amps! I would expect powering one from the onboard USB to cause problems no matter what PSU is connected as the Pi is fitted with an onboard 1Amp PolyFuse!

Well I connected up my USB-HDD last night and that all works fine on the RC6 build, so nothing wrong with that it seems.

I am connecting the HDD to a powered USB Hub (With 2A supply) and it also has two USB plugs so it can pull power from both ports (Although it did power up with just one connected I didn’t run any tests in that configuration).

The above was all done on a Rev 1.0 board, I know the Rev 1.1 and Rev 2.0 boards are able to provide more power via the onboard USB ports, however that shouldn’t make a difference when a powered USB hub is being used.