High pitched noise when powering Rock 5C via Penta SATA Hat

#1

Hey,
I have successfully built together a small little NAS using a Rock 5C and a penta SATA hat, but when I provide power to the hat via the barrel jack, a very high pitched noise comes out of my contraption, that gets quieter when the CPU is under load or the SATA hat is doing write operations.

My power supply is a Leicke 12V 5A PSU and I am using 4 Samsung 870 Evo 4TB SSDs

I have multiple questions in this regard:

  1. The Penta SATA Hat wiki describes that it is possible to power it through the Rock 5Cs USB-C Port. Does the GPIO header handle this much current in my case and is it a good idea?
  2. If not, how can I fix this noise? I may try another power supply but I don’t have one on hand at the moment

I am also not a person that regularly posts to forums and rather search for the information myself, but I could barely find anything related to this topic.

Thank you in advance!

#2

testing the hardware portion
did you try another 12V supplier / the USB-C option / other disks

#3

I tried another 12V power supply, the problem still persists, and i tried with no disks and it also didn’t help.

The only thing that worked was to supply the Rock 5C via USB, which worked, but I am unsure how taxing it is on the hardware.

#4

regarding the USB-C option, my experience is align with


I use the official Raspberry Pi4 USB-C powersupply with 15 W and measure with my low load profile - plex only and not converting - with a wattmeter a total load of
10 W when all disks (2 SSD, 2 HDD) running,
7 W on Pi 5 idle and disks sleeping and
up to 12 W on short peaks.
There are no indications on low power in dmesg.
With that the official Raspberry Pi5 USB-C powersupply with 27 W may be a choice to handle higher load profiles.

If the issue on 12V still persists even with a different manufacturer it seems that the hat’s power converter has an issue, maybe you can get in direct contact like here

#5

That SATA hat has a converter to generate 5V from 12V. Sometimes this DCDC-converters make noises. My hat does not make a noise when connected to 12V (but maybe I am just too old to hear it).
You could only try another hat.

By the way, I also want to switch from Rock4B to Rock5C with PentaSataHat.
Which image are you using? The only image that works out of the box is RADXA rock-5c_bookworm_cli. But when updates are installed the SATA hat stops working.

,Fred

#6

The SATA Hat itself worked for me with the official Radxa OS Lite for Rock 5C (Which I am using right now) and with ubuntu-rockchip for Rock 5C. The Software for the Top Board only worked in Radxa OS for me and also only after slightly modifying an environment file. Even after installing updates it has recognized the Penta SATA Hat as a PCIE device with lspci and listed all four drives with lsblk.

Link to Radxa OS Images:

Link to Top Board Fix:

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