M3 not botting when plugged new hard drive

Hi, I am using from couple of weeks Banana PI M3. From beggining I was using external drive. It was WD device. I have got some issues with this device connected with some read/write operations (I’ve similiar problems with this device plugged to Raspberry Pi) so I decided to buy new, bigger and better drive - Seagate Expansion 4TB Portable External Hard Drive USB 3.0.

Unfortunately more problems have occured. When I plugged my new hard drive, M3 stopped boot. When I unplugged hd, M3 started to boot properly. When I have tried to plug device later, during runtime, there Was no issues, but sometimes after some time of heavy copy & paste operations on hard drive, my banana was turning off completly

Currently I’m using Ubuntu Mate 16.04 and official Banana DC adapter 5V 2A. I have no other usb peripherials. I’ve already set max_usb_current=1 in /boot/config.txt

Do you have any suggestions, what can be wrong?

Banana Pi M3 is not designed to be used together with hard disks: http://linux-sunxi.org/Banana_Pi_M3

You should also note that /boot/config.txt is of no use here since this is not a Raspberry Pi. This file will never be read and you can also delete it.

Ok, but why /boot/config.txt is present in case if it is not used on m3? I’ve downloaded this distro PBI-M3 new image:ubuntu-mate-16.04-desktop-armhf-raspberry-pi-bpi-m3-sd-emmc.img 2016-07-21 prepared for M3. Is there any equivalent option for this file?

My previous hard drive was working, and many other things also. I’ve ordered yesterday active powered usb hub with DC 5V 1A. You think that this my help? I’ve read this article and I see that there is a problem with powering. Any other suggestions what can help?

Maybe to fool customers? Same happens with HDMI resolutions. Those Bananas except of the first ones only support a few HDMI resolutions and users coming from Raspberries waste many hours of their life editing config.txt to get proper display support to no avail.

Well, if your old HDD was USB2.0 it had to take less power. USB3.0 goes up to 900mA. Powering it via an USB-Hub was a very good idea.

Which socket do you have to power the board, MicroUSB or already the Jack 4 x 1,7mm ?

The old one was also USB 3.0, but it was much smaller - only 1TB. I hope that usb hub will help…

I’ve already got the jack 5V 2A.