Since a few days back I have been having problem with my external SSD-drive connected to my Rpi5 with DietPi. I’m using the drive as a backup drive to which i sync several folders from my desktop-PC over SFTP. This has worked fine for over a year but recently i started having problems.
While transferring over SFTP the transmission stops after a few minutes. Soon I receive an error message in my software (FreeFileSync) stating “Cannot write file location and file name LIBSSH2_ERROR_TIMEOUT: Operation timed out after 10 seconds. [libssh2_sftp_open]”
I’ve tried changing drives, cables and so on but it does not help. I have tried with the same drive etc. on my RPi4 running the same version of DietPi and it does not have any problems.
When I try to open dietpi-drive_manager nothing happens and I receive no error message.
After i reboot the Rpi5 and try to start dietpi-drive_manager it’s still unresponsive. I then have to run sudo nano /etc/fstab and remove the line for the drive, save and then reboot. Then I can start Dietpi-drive_manager again but the drive is not visible. My only course of action is to remove the drive and reformat it on my desktop.
I have searched the existing open and closed issues
I have three of the same enclosure and the same drive (Samsung 870 EVO 2TB SATA). The two others work just fine on my RPi4 running DietPi. They used to work fine with my Rpi5 also but recently i encoutered this problem. So the hardware is the same as before.
hmm so far we know such a behavior from the RPI4. normally there are problems if hard disks are only operated via USB, as the USB ports of the RPI4 are not designed for this. It is therefore recommended to always use powered USB hubs or similar on a RPI4.
On the RPi5 it could possibly have something to do with the power settings. Maybe @MichaIng can help on this.
Ok, I tried switching out my enclosure to the SSD for a SATA to USB adapter with external power: Startech USB312SAT3. When using this I never experienced any problem during the SFTP transfer. It completed in 3 hours as usual (when starting with an empty drive) and no errors. I guess some update to the Pi5 (maybe kernel or firmware-related?) in the last few weeks increased the power usage of the device and as a consequence it was not able to provide the necessary additional power over USB to the external drive anymore, therefore the need of an external power source. My speculation.
Ok, I have not tried changing voltage on RPi5 before. Do you have any suggestions regarding which setting i should adjust in this case? If I understand it correctly it’s either one of these three strings i should modify (I have not changed any frequency settings): over_voltage_min over_voltage_delta over_voltage
On the Raspberry Pi 5 (and 4), if you want to reduce the voltage a bit to save power, use the over_voltage_delta setting. It keeps the dynamic voltage adjustment active, but lowers the base value. Use e.g. -25000 to reduce base voltage by 25,000 microvolts. The over_voltage and over_voltage_min were the old settings, to set idle (min) and active voltage values, but those disable dynamic voltage adjustment on RPi 4 and 5.
EDIT: Ah, I should have read the context of the question. So if you system has stability problems, indeed try to raise the value instead. E.g. over_voltage_delta=50000 to raise it by 50,000 microvolts = 50 milivolts.