SATA Drive problems

Banana Pi SBCs design BPI-M1/M1+/R1(A20)
1

I’m having a problem getting a particular drive to work with my banana pi m1. I have been running tests to try and diagnose where the problem lies, perhaps people could point me in the direction of a solution?

The drive works in another pc, and also with the BPI if I power the drive from another pc. However, the cable does work with another SATA drive I have, that drive is an SSD.

So it seems that the issue lies in the combination of hard drive and cable, as the cable works with another hard drive, and the hard drive works when powered by another pc.

So far I have run the following tests:

Does not work:

  • M1 with SATA hard drive powered by the bpi

Works:

  • BPI with the SATA hard drive powered by separate PC
  • BPI with a separate SSD hard drive, powered by the bpi
  • SATA hard drive in another PC
2

Having has a look around a bit more, my guess is that this is based on power to the HDD. I’ve seen that others have issues with 3.5 inch disks not getting enough power from the BPI on its own. Is there a recommended solution to this? Does anyone have an opinion on whether or not this would work?:

3

If anyone comes across this in the future, the problem was caused by the power requirements of the 3.5 inch hdd. A 2.5 inch hdd works fine with only the power from the SATA