Orange pi barrel plug USB cable wearing out?

[joeltoh95]

I have an orange pi plus 2e running 24/7 as a file server, torrent box, plex server, pi-hole etc. It has been running fine for the first few months I have gotten it. Recently the usb HDD that is connected to it started disconnecting often during heavy loads ( downloading torrents) or sometimes randomly. I assumed that it was the usb power adapter fault ( I used a samsung 5a 2v power adapter ) and I replaced it with an identical one. However the problem still persist. Could it be the usb to barrel plug cable that is sold from aliexpress be at fault? 

[Tido]

To analyse the problem, have you installed RPi-Monitor (sudo armbianmonitor -ru) I don't know which voltages of the device are tracked but it might give an indication.

Beside that, put the USB-HHD on a powered USB-Hub, if you have one available.

 

Edited May 19, 2017 by Tido
wrong letter according following post of TK

[tkaiser]

4 minutes ago, Tido said:

have you installed RPi-Monitor (sudo armbianmonitor -u) I don't know which voltages of the device are tracked

 

It would be -r instead and it's useless anyway since H3 devices aren't equipped with a PMIC and there are no voltage readouts possible (VCore in RPi-Monitor is faked). So it's visiting linux-sunxi wiki for schematics, grabbing the multimeter and verify voltages on testpoints following the procedure @TonyMac32outlined over there (measuring idle and 'full load' using cpuminer to generate some load and then also a connected disk tortured by 'stress -d 1')

[Tido]

The regulator of OPi plus2E has no interface (I2C or such) to read out ?
 

Then I guess the powered USB-Hub is at first the easier solution to analyse.

[zador.blood.stained]

USB ports are powered through SY6280AAC with current limit set to ~1.1A (one switch for a double USB socket and another switch for a single USB socket), so IMO if something would degrade from peak current of spinning up HDDs it would be these switches.