[SOLVED] Samsung 990 PRO 2TB SSD

#1

Hello everyone,

I recently acquired a Rock 5B with 32GB of RAM, but unfortunately, I’ve encountered some significant issues that have left me feeling disappointed. I’m hoping to get some guidance on how to proceed.

  1. Running of EFI partition: I’ve noticed that the system is configured to use an EFI partition with an ext4 filesystem as the Linux root. While I find this unusual, it’s not my main concern at the moment.
  2. Samsung 990 PRO 2TB SSD: My biggest problem lies with the SSD. Whenever I attempt to write data to it, regardless of the source (USB drive or network), the SSD freezes. I’ve experimented with different kernels, including Armbian 6.8 and Arch with Joshua’s 5.10, but the issue persists. Additionally, after encountering this problem, the Pi sometimes refuses to boot from the SSD for a period of time. Interestingly, I’ve tested the SSD on another PC by writing a significant amount of data to it, and it worked flawlessly. This leads me to suspect that there may be an issue with the NVMe on my Pi.

I’m at a loss for what to do next. Should I reach out to the merchant I purchased the Rock 5B from for assistance, or is there another avenue I should explore? Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance for your help.

EDIT: Samsung 990 PRO is probably OK and not the root cause of the problem. Some Western Digital SSD 512 GB pulled out of my laptop behaves the same. Memtest fails on my particular Pi so in case you are intersted in compatibility of the SSD - there should be no problem as long as the rest of your Pi is OK.

#2

Most of my problems I had came down to the power supply. Which one are you using and have you checked sensors to see that the board actually gets enough power?

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#3

The voltage and current under sensors are the PD negotiation values, if you are using a fixed voltage power supply they’re not accurate, for example I’m using a 12V2A power supply and it reports 5V 1.5A.

#4

I didn’t mention power supply because that’s sorted out: 12V3A dumb DC

Actually I tried to debug it more and memtest is failing so I guess I got a piece with faulty memory.

#5

It still might be the power supply issue. Depends on the power supply quality. I power the 5B with the 12V DC output from my old DELL monitor. No idea on how much amps it can deliver, it is not documented. But it works fine. I have just occasional boot issues which might be not related to power supply at all.

Couple days ago I tried the power brick with the molex connector. It is rated to 2A on the 12V line. Should be enough for my setup with just the one (quite low power) nvme and emmc attached. But it does not boot at all. I checked the voltage during boot and it falls down to some 9V with this power brick and therefore it is not able to boot.

#6

As far as I know the 32G RAM model has some quirks in the choice of rkbin in the image. It contains some memory configuration information, so if its version is out of date, it may cause instability.

#7

Can you elaborate this? I have examined dtos but it is not text file and I don’t understand it at all.

I looked up how old were kernel packages that I used and joshua (from 7Ji) was a few days old, radaxa (from 7Ji) was several months old and Armbian was pretty recent I guess.

Is there any new enough kernel package in the 7Ji repository for Archlinux?

#8

Can you elaborate this?

I don’t have an 32G RAM board. Just a guess.



1 Like
#9

@nyanmisaka thanks.

Radxa team agreed to test a testing image on another Pi. I will let you know if another Pi works or not. I will include memtester (from Arch repo) and test program from foxx1337 from Armbian forum. I guess we will know if this was really faulty HW or problem with DTB.

BTW I want to express my thanks to the Radxa team which agreed to test my custom image on another Pi. Thumbs Up.

2 Likes
#10

Really appreciated, my hope (and bet) is that it’s just software, so that we can all learn and gain from your experience, as opposed to it being hardware, where only you have to suffer through getting another machine.

#11

Sorry everyone, it took a while. Nevertheless it is ready. I decided to share it openly with you.

User: root
Pass: root

Directory with files:

GDrive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1nQujUB9F8mJQBi16zOKGacdo1NmxpaVt?usp=sharing

Mega: https://mega.nz/folder/xOUlXa6D#nE5d4i6mrMJeWuyMFLu9yg

Files:

  • sd.img.xz
    • image based on @kwankiu’s script
    • uses Joshua’s kernel - Every kernel of Joshua, Radxa, Armbian behave the same
    • bootable from SD card (feel free)
  • test.tar.bz2
    • Test scripts only
  • Test{1,2,3}.MOV
    • How does the test look on my Rock 5B

Tests:

All of them should be out-of-te-box runnable on basically whatever HW. Test 3 depends on Archlinux when memtester is not installed. I haven’t hardcoded the 32 GB RAM size and they read /proc/meminfo.

  • ./test1.sh - Test which uses tmpfs and copy /dev/urandom -> RAM
  • ./test2.sh - Test based on @foxx1337 test - it allocates single large vector and my addition is that then it writes zeroes and ones to it.
  • ./test3.sh - Test which uses memtester from Archlinux repo
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#12

Radxa reports that tests passed on another Rock 5B. So I am ordering new one. I think taht solves the question HW vs. SW. It was HW, but I will confirm that when I receive the new device.