bxm

I've found, that SATA HDD are still spins-up during daily cron job. Short investigation showed, that the cause is the "sync" command in the syncToDisk() function. Replacing it with "sync /var" (or "sync /", to be safe), completely fixes this problem.

It is possible that this fixes the issue described below? I've noticed reduced color space when playing video with mpv on 5.10 (kernel 3.4.112, cubietruck, HDMI). It can be easily seen when viewing video like this one: (it was re-encoded to h264 of course). One may note gray scales in range 0-16 and 236-245 are almost indistinguishable (first three are almost white and last three are almost black). To verify that this is not board itself, I've extracted one frame from the video and it shows nicely in picture viewer. The same video are also plays fine in Kodi on RPI2B.

It seems, that stability issues are indeed directly related to the version/assembly of u-boot. I've built complete image of Ubuntu 14.04.03 LTS on 11.11.2015 which identifies itself as: Title: Armbian 4.6 Cubietruck Ubuntu trusty default (unofficial) Kernel: Linux 3.4.110 It was quite unstable and could be easily made to hang completely by running "memtester 1500'. Then u-boot was downgraded to 4.5 via apt-get while keeping kernel the same. After that, the board become stable and survived several days under the load of memtester. There seems to be an additional issue of stability with 2.5" hdd connected, but it manifests itself even with original Cubian image. Preliminary fix for it includes soldering of 220uF electrolytic capacitor directly to the pins of DC-IN jack. In both cases, board was powered via "official" 12to5V DC-DC converter.