HDDs not recognized and making clicking noises

ARGON EON DISCUSSION
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1

Hi,

I’ve got my argon eon the other day and I was really excited to get some use out of some old drives that I had salvage from old laptops. I’m running a raspberry pi 4 8gb with the eon.
The drives are healthy as I’ve verified with an external adapter and the pi is also working as expected.
I’ve tried 4 different drives in all different slots and they all start clicking. Running lsblk I sometimes see the drives before they disappear.
I’m not a linux expert, any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

2

Sounds like bad drives to me… Or they are getting insufficient power. Every time I’ve had drives start “clicking” they were dead

3

Hi

If you use traditional hard drives, some brands (and model sometimes) require a lot of power.

I would recommend the use of SSD drives or to have a very good power source.

Also try having more power on component with good settings on pi.

Get in mind this : admitted USB cumulated load for raspberry pi4 is 1200mA

EON looks build for handling 4 sata drives, but is the 5A power unit sufficient ?

Can you try hard drive one by one ?

4

The drives are working fine, I’ve tested them individually.

5

I’ve checked the spec on the drives and they are 3 drives at 5v 700mA and one 5v 450mA.
Could you elaborate on what you mean with cumulated load of pi4 being 1200mA.
My understanding is that the drives are powered by the board that is fed 12v from the power supply the pi isn’t powering the drives?

6

Sounds logical to me

The provided power unit deliver 60W

Total disks consumption is less than 15W based on the specs you found.

Seems to be ok, your setup should work regarding power consumption.

A good test would be to check the EON unit power consumption without any disk.

1200 mA limitation is for cumulated USB capacity for all 4 ports on the pi board.

7

Check on the power draw at STARTUP of the drive, and how much can it pull when the heads move from beginning to the end of the drive…

I would assume a power issue and try:

  1. Setup with one 3.5" drive and see if it reliable
  2. Add in the other 3.5" drive and see if the system remains reliable

Keep adding drives til you get the clicking sound. I suspect the process of starting the drive draws more power than the system can handle so… the drives cant get what they want and don’t start.

This is a very low power system. Spinning rust (i.e. hard drives) are not “low power”

I have worked on three storage systems that all had power issues… they were fine with some drives, and had major issues with others. Typically its not the 5 volts that’s the issue, its the 12.

NHHiker