Alexander Eiblinger

Hi. I'm in the process of preparing to sell my Helios64. If you interested let me know. (I'm selling it as one of the HD power rails does not bring the needed voltage anymore ... and I need more disks now).

I'm not an expert here, but I have struggled with "failed" disks quite some time meanwhile ... According to your dmesg you disk has no link 2.670580] ata1: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) I'd interpret this as "there is no disk plugged in" ... so I'd guess it is more a cable topic. So I'd do the obvious: Make sure that the disk is properly plugged in and really reaches the connectors of the backplane. Inspect the cable harnes from the other side, is it really correctly installed. In worst case: remove the cable from the vaulty slot and plug it directly into the disc.

Just for the files, in case anyone is interested: It seems my power rail A is faulty. I measured the voltages ... if no disk is connected I have 4.90V (which is a little less in my opinion). If I connect a disk to rail A, the power drops down to 4.10V ... I guess this is far too low to have the disk(s) start up successfully. Not sure how to deal with that at the moment. Intended to use the 12V of rail A with a step down converter to get my needed 5V (I have 2.5" disks, no need for 12V), but it seems that the 12V are not switched of, if the helios64 is down. It still provides 12V ... For the moment I have removed the original SATA harness and replaced it with my own cables - having 3 disks on rail B. Works for the moment.

Hi there ... Not sure if anyone has an idea here, but I have the following topic: I have a helios64, equipped with 3 2.5" disk drives, running Debian 10 with Kernel 5.10.43. Usually the system runs stable ... even for days (24/7). But every now and then the disks "fail" - which means, during normal operation suddenly the disk turn of, linux reports "sata link down" ... and the disks are off. As if they were removed. If I reboot I usually here only some "klicks" ... I assume the disks try to spin up, but fail due to not enough power (?). To recover from that situation, I usually disconnect power (incl. the internal UPS) ... try a few times, and sooner or later disks power successfully up again. Then the system run's again for a while without any issues. I already tried to re-cable everything, trying to ensure that the cables are properly connected, but this does not seem to help. I assume that there is an hardware issue with the SATA power rails (both show the same effect). For that reason I'm looking for the schematics, to trace that a little deeper ... anyone an idea if they are somewhere available? Thanks!

Not sure if this is something you want to consider: Using a Rasperry Pi 4 Compute Module ("CM4") it is possible to build a not too bad NAS To use the CM4 you need a "IO Board" (e.g. https://www.berrybase.de/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-computer/compute-modules/raspberry-pi-compute-module-4-io-board). The IO board has a PCIe port - and there you can plugin e.g. a 6bay SATA card. So in the end you get RP4 with as many SATA ports as you want / need. I have this running (but not in the enclosure of the Helios64) - performance is not that good as of the Helios64, but pretty close. It is running without any issues so far. The size of the system could fit into the Helios64 enclosure - some tinkering will be needed of course.