05-28-2019, 05:09 PM
(05-28-2019, 02:18 PM)Nikolay_Po Wrote: Are the metal parts of the HDD cases connected to board ground? Somewhere was a notice that without ground connection between the HDD case and board GND there may be a lot of errors. I've ordered (23 of May) ROCKPro64 and the same ASMedia SATA adapter as yours but without of a case. Still awaiting, the delivery will be not quite fast. I will try too.I did a continuity test between sbc mounting bolts and hdd case and it is good. There are mounting posts in the nas case that you screw sbc to. See below youtube video and forward to 1 minute.
There may be several places where an error may arise. Besides the software problem and overheating, the signal integrity may be the cause of an errors.
Try to:
After the heating was not confirmed I'm suspecting the signal integrity problem. I'm wondering the SBC board has insulated mounting openings. So there may be none ground contact to the metal case as it is in case of traditional PCs or laptops.
- Connect DC IN ground at DC iN socket to the metal case. And ensure the drives have a contact to the case, metal by metal. Add a wire or sand of the paint/coating from metal parts of the case to ensure good electrical contact. As a quick test you may connect RJ-45 shield to the NAS case by shortest wire possible.
- Take a wire and try to additionally connect the lower screw of SATA card to the ground of ROCKPro64. You may connect this wire to metal shield of RJ-45 or USB connector. The best is to connect to ground contact of DC IN. The is a GND mark at DC IN socket ground pin. It is between the DC socket and aluminum can capacitor. The aim is to connect the controller board ground to the same ground where the HDDs are supplying.
- Change SATA wires.
The absence of a good ground contact allows the noise to be induced between the case (the drives) and the board because there is none good direct contact between the board and the case.
The disk drives requiring more power than SSDs we saw on demo video of a good man with a big glasses. That is why supply converters on HDD supply wires may produce more noise being more loaded. And this noise voltage may become too high to be suppressed by SATA differential pair interfaces, both HDD and a controller.
The good ground contact is crucial. Even if Ohmic (Galvanic) contact is good and your Ohm-meter shows below 1 Ohm between the SBC and HDD, the wire loops and power converters may induce high frequency noise on a wires and even on PCB traces.
Good practice for digital circuits is to connect the board ground to the chassis extensively, at each mounting screw. You may see this approach in any desktop or laptop PC. Again, I'm wondering why Pine64 PCB is different.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UeeklKo0Og
As i tried with single hard drive and still get the same issues it has to do something with timing for drive to spinup.
What you listed regarding ground may help with errors during copying of the files but looking at it as none electronics specialist, connector that has 4 pins on pcb close to dc jack feeds the drives with power, yes there is a converter of some type in between to reduce 12v to 5v or 3v but i would think ground should be solid.
I am using sata cables provided by pine64 but i had to bend them a bit at the connectors on pci card and hdd side as otherwise they either get in contact with case fan or with case cover. I will try to look around for spares at home and do tests to exclude those.
One thing to note is that i added zalman fanmate 2 that i had laying around to this 12 feed as i couldn't control case fan with cpu temperatures, it didn't make sense.
I got mine in 20 days since placing the order but it all depends what time and where and customs.