RPi4 - duff SSD or not enough power - how to tell

LybsterKodi · April 11, 2023 at 10:19 AM

Playing with the RPi4B 4GB, as a temporary measure I plugged in a micro SD card, ethernet cable, wireless keyboard dongle, Haupagge tuner and a 128GB SSD.

Trying to start it up I get the initial boot screen then it just goes black. If I unplug the SSD it will boot correctly and I can then plug the SSD back in and access the videos on it.

I have a 3A power supply (from ThePiHut), and not only does the SSD work on the Pi I can find no problems on it when plugged into either a Windows PC or a Linux Mint PC.

I'm not overly bothered because I'll be plugging a powered 6TB drive in for real but I'm interested as to what the problem is. Any thoughts?

MatteN · April 11, 2023 at 10:53 AM

Depending on what kind of SSD it is they can consume upp to 15W or more.

petediscrete · April 11, 2023 at 11:47 AM

Have you got the latest firmware installed and correctly configured on the RPI4. Sounds like your RPI4 is trying to boot from SSD.

LybsterKodi · April 11, 2023 at 11:56 AM

MatteN

Good thought but it runs fine when the Pi has booted. Its a RCESSD and the label says 1A. I can't find the requirements for the Haupagge but it says either USB 2 or 3 and looking those up a USB 2 can deliver 100mA. Using the same measure for the keyboard dongle that would give 1.2A Best info I can find for the ethernet is 180mA so say 1.4mA total leaving 1.6 mA for the Pi itself.

petediscrete

That was one of my thoughts and I did set it up for that before but I wiped the SSD and loaded videos onto it. Wiped using MiniTool which showed only the one ExFAT partition.

LybsterKodi · April 11, 2023 at 1:07 PM

I found this

Pi 4 maximum power consumption

What is the maximum theoretical power consumption of Pi 4? I had expected that I would be able to find some sort of specification table for that, but I could…

raspberrypi.stackexchange.com

makes interesting reading

Pretoriano · April 11, 2023 at 1:18 PM

What's more important in this case is how much power RPi4 can provide over USB ports ,which is 1.2A MAX.

NOTE that this applies to all USB ports ,so if a device connected to an USB port requires 1.0A to work correctly ,then a second device ,connected on another USB port ,cannot/shouldn't draw more than 200mA.

Reference link

petediscrete · April 11, 2023 at 1:33 PM

Mirror your setup in RaspiOS and attempt to boot again. Without any form of log it’s all just speculation. At least that would rule in/out any firmware issues.

You could edit the /boot/cmdline.txt, remove the quiet option and watch the console for all messages during the boot process. That should give you an idea what you should be looking out for.