Troubles with cheap SATA to USB adaptor.

[superpat]

Hi,

The other day I purchased a cheap  (on offer) new  Crucial  M.2 profile 1TB  Sata SSD.

I also purchased from ebay a nice looking  black anodised aluminium case to house the SSD. It has a Sata to USB 3 converter, and connects with a short cable and USB3 connector, It was about £7. It uses  a J Micron  I.C. control chip.
 
At first it all appeared fine!. I connected to my Linux mint dev system,  formatted the ssd and downloaded 269GB of flac  high def files at 100MB/s   super I thought.   I left the drive connected and when I returned to it after an hour,  the drive had disconnected from my system. I had to unplug and replug it to get it connected.

I didn't pursue this problem, but moved the ssd over to a Moode system, which saw the drive as an external usb and started to catalogue it.  This never finished, and when I investigated, the drive had vanished from Moode as well.

Googling this type of problem, I found lots of similar issues. One fellow claimed (unsupported) that  Micron chipset controllers were responsible but other chip vendors were OK. Other people claimed it was a heat issue in the aluminium enclosure as there are no vents, others claimed low power.   At the mo, I have a 5.2v 8A  yes 8A, power supply feeding my Moode system, don't ask,  and I never see any lightning symbols on the PI! I have an usb inline checker connected and it is showing 5.1v and 240 mA  for the USB to SSD set.

I have just ordered and am waiting for it to arrive, a Starcom ssd to usb adaptor, id SM2NGFFMBU33, which has a ASMedia - ASM1153E chipset. It was more expensive, so I hope this one works correctly.

I will keep you posted on progress.

Has anyone else had a similar problem?

regards

Patrick

[BryceJ]

I have a similar small enclosure for a 1TB M.2 drive and it was hard to move 1TB of music to it. It would overheat and then disappear from my system after about 15 minutes of transferring files. The enclosure was noticeably warm to the touch. I have used the drive with moOde a lot since transferring the files and it is working well now. I have catalogued the files many, many times for test purposes without issue.

[rikardo1979]

Using this cheap one from Amazon (currently not available). Never had any issue with it over two years of usage.

[superpat]

Hi
That's not a M.2 adaptor.
It also has an external 5V power connection my m.2 to usb3 adaptor is bus powered

I am leaning now to a problem with the pi,s Internal usb hub, maybe power supply noise or voltagel evel.
There are several long and rambling bug sagas in the raspberry pi git hub that' are about exactly the same reported fault message as I am getting,although due in their cases to an external usb hub connected to a pi. Cannot determine what if any was the outcome!!

My new Startech  enclosure has arrived. it is ventilated and runs cold, but it fails same as first. Fitting basic m.2 ssd into laptop  works ok all time so ssd in fine when not used in adaptor.
Also usb3 spinner harddrive works fine in pi.

Will set up another pi to test problem..

P

[CallMeMike]

Hi
That's not a M.2 adaptor.
It also has an external 5V power connection my m.2 to usb3 adaptor is bus powered

............................
P

Probably @rikardo1979 meant to point out that his particular external adapter has been faultess with the same J Micron  I.C. control chip... go figure

[rikardo1979]

Hi
That's not a M.2 adaptor.
It also has an external 5V power connection my m.2 to usb3 adaptor is bus powered

Sorry, my bad. I have overlooked the 'M.2'. But anyway, I use it without external PSU, so its powered just through USB from Pi and also to mention it has a same JMicron chipset

[superpat]

rikardo1979

Hi
That's not a M.2 adaptor.
It also has an external 5V power connection my m.2 to usb3 adaptor is bus powered

Sorry, my bad. I have overlooked the 'M.2'. But anyway, I use it without external PSU, so its powered just through USB from Pi and also to mention it has a same JMicron chipset

Hi All,

Many thanks to you all for  taking the time to reply to my problem.

I have vanished completely  down the rabbit hole now!  Curiouser and curiouser.

I set up a completely separate second Raspberry Pi 3B v1.2 system, using the latest Moode 4.3 dis.  Powered it from a meaty home brew linear ps (it will give 5A), connected it to gpios. set the input volts to 5.2V at the Gpio pins

Added the usb3 disk adaptor to the pi's usb. NOTE No other usb connection! Headless only  no pi display.  Self powered  Dac connected by jumpers to i2S Gpios

The usb ssd would not attach on this completely separate system!   Dmesg repeatedly called out connection errors PLUS an occasional red error saying power low and pi firmware speed limited.

Put my USB  checker dongle on of the spare usb sockets on the pi, measured VDC = 4.4v to 4.65V jittering   !!!!!!

At this point I  started to believe the ssd and /or the dongle were knackered, so  I dug out an Odroid XU4 that has Ubuntu on it.  Eventually found the Odroid 4a ps, booted it up and connected the "problem" USB3  ssd to the Odroid's  USB3 port.  It mounted with NO errors, it took about thirty seconds to catalogue  the media,( 275Gb) and list in in a directory.  It has been running for three hours playing jazz from the ssd on VLC, output over the hdmi monitor I attached.  

It has not dropped, detached or stuttered all afternoon.  Absolutely b****y fine. Unmounting the drive,  Pulling out the usb cable and reinserting  picks up fine,   no errors at all

 BTW,  Both pi's run fine on  Moode AND a USB2 2TB WD spinning platter hard drive, that is USB bus powered


Why is  the Raspberry pi 3B v1.2 such a problem connecting to the Startech or the cheap no name M.2 to USB3  adaptor.

The raspberry pi foundation are very coy about releasing the full schematics for the Raspberry pi.  They have released partial Schematics, that very inconveniently do not show the usb circuitry.

One thing that it may be is that a 1TB SSD may require a BIG inrush current to get all the silicon fed at switch on,  and there is not enough capacitance on the 5v  to 3.3 v power supply in the adaptor to satisfy this inrush. This results in the PI trying to deliver a current beyond  its usb capability, and sets up this failing oscillation.  I measured the USB running current to the ssd adaptor to be about 240mA, but I have no idea what a fast inrush spike may be.   I could put my scope on it, but I am losing too  much time playing with this! Her indoors wants our lounge decorated by Christmas!

I don't want to, but I suppose the next step is to interpose a powered usb hub between the ssd and the raspberry.  I have a hub in a junk box somewhere,  have to spend a happy Sunday out in the garage scrabbbling for it

I wish Moode supported processors other than the Raspberry pi.

regards

P

[TheOldPresbyope]

@superpat

Since this tale of woe is all about your RPi3 and not moOde, I suggest you post it to the Raspberry Pi forum to see what the gurus of the Foundation have to say about their power circuitry.

It's not impossible to port moOde to another SBC family but the amount of heavy lifting involved first in the port and then in the maintenance of the port over time is not realistic given the level of support this project receives.

Even the music players which do run on different SBCs have varying levels of support. Take Volumio, for example. The binary download for Raspberry Pi is at version 2.502; for Odriod C1 and C2, version 2.344, 10 months behind the current version for Raspberry Pi. Surprise, there isn't any binary download at all for Odroid XU4. I think it's clear such ports exist only because some person decided to try and not because there is true ongoing multi-SBC work.

Just my two cents worth (and I own a multitude of SBCs including Odroid, a lovely little Cubox-i, a Wandboard, even a couple of "the C.H.I.P.").

Regards,
Kent