Hi, I have issues with external hard drives. First and foremost, I have a proper power supply and a proper cable. In fact, tried several of them. I have a 3a and a 4.2a charger and really, really good cables.
Now.
1 time out of 3 when I issue a reboot command the USB hard disk is not "seen" on reboot. The device /dev/sd* doesn't exist. Even if I unplug the drive and plug it back, nothing. I have to issue a poweroff command and unplug the power supply and plug it back for the hard drive to show up on reboot.
I have 3 ext4 hard drives, all show the same behaviour. (the 3 are not plugged at the same time).
So to repeat the bug: on reboot the hard disk is not seen by the os 1 out of 3 times. Unplugging and plugging it back doesn't help, I have to completely unplug the NanoPi and plug it back to see the HD again.
Once in a while also during normal operations, the hard drive will vanish, much like described by @datajerk on nov 9. I have the same issue as him. He also tried multiple power sources and cables, even powering his board through headers and everyone here said it was a power issue. I don't think it is, you just have to reboot a couple of times to see that the drive will get lost.
I didn't tried the FriendlyElec distro to see if it exibits the same behaviour. Pretty much happening on every version of Armbian I tried, even the latest kernel in nightly.
Thanks for your help!
(I have the 4GB board)