Rock64 v2 Locking Up when Accessing External Storage

[theGAXman]

I have a Rock64 connected using the factory power cable to a 60W power supply. In some conditions, the Rock will partially lockup until I reboot.

It is easiest to reproduce when I try to quickly tab complete several directories in a row on external storage.

Code:

ls /srv/dev [tab]/Dir1 [tab]/Dir2 [tab]

...that type of thing. After about 2-3 tab completions in quick succession, it will freeze and I won't be able to do anything that accesses that partition. But I can still SSH in and do other things, including access other partitions.

I have tried this on four different external drives. 3 USB-powered 2.5" drives (WD and Seagate, with and without powered USB hub), and one Anker USB to SATA adapter (externally powered). Happens on both USB 2.0 and 3.0. So far I have only seen this on NTFS, and not on my EXT4 partitions.

I first noticed this on LibreElec. I recently switched to OpenMediaVault and am still having issues.

Any idea what to do with this?

[Rocklobster]

Have you tried Armbian with this setup. Might be worth a try to rule out any hardware issues. If you do rule hardware issues you can dig down a little deeper on the software issues. I'm assuming you are using the recommended power supply and it is in good working order and are powering the USB drives from their own power supplies.

[tomarm]

From what I can gather and my experience with my 5yr old dock some usb3 chipsets in the docks cause timeouts/freezes.    I'm replacing mine soon.

FWIW I now have armbian bionic installed on the 2.5" hhd/dock with the spi flashed with ayufans thing for that. No usb3 hangs and ssh works fine for hours. I think it has to do with how armbian handles UAS/usb module blacklisting/loading vs other distro's. Some kind of advanced insight patches I guess. Couldn't get this to work reliably with Arch/Manjaro arm for rock64 so rocklobster is correct in his suggestion which I fought doing for 2 weeks since I like Arch. Learned a lesson there.