Blocks stalled out and became extremely slow to sync around 70%. Then 5 days later around 80% they just stopped syncing altogether. Now Umbrel doesn’t even acknowledge the SSD is connected at all even though it is.
I’m wondering if there’s an issue with the SSD or the enclosure. Not sure why there would be, but what is the heck is going on? Never ever had this many issues with my original Umbrel on the Pi4. Ran rock solid for years and now everything is just terrible after trying to upgrade to a 2TB SSD.
Its sounds like a firmware issue. Because boot settings you set up with the raspi-config and write the settings in its firmware.
What you should do is set up a usb stick with rasbain so you can set up the Pi5 hardware. I have one running Ubuntu but I have a usb stick set up that way since I don’t have raspi-config on my ubuntu instance. Which is the only way to set up the pcie mode to pcie3 and change booting. I have mine booing to a M.2 drive (on a hat), but I imagine its the same affair with a SSD hat. The kernel level its running on the x86 version isn’t that great, but I imagine that might be the issue with the pi5 since the firmware does change with Kernel versions.
But I will mention that the usb ports are weak sauce and are not really usb3.0 compliant and you should use a powered USB hub when using a USB drive enclosure. That is why I switched to a hat because the usb to m.2 enclosure acted up the same way and a powered hub fixed it, but I got a M.2 hat later and reconfigured booting in the firmware.
I rigged up a powered SSD dock and it’s syncing better now and much faster. Seems the issue was the Pi couldn’t provide enough power to the SSD enclosure, or it was spotty at best (it worked great up until about 70% sync). Umbrel should update it’s official RasPi hardware guide making this clear. I spent weeks troubleshooting this.
Back when I tested the ports they only have about 750mA of current capacity which only usb sticks will be able to run on them without issues.
Everyone is making low quality boards. Even PC motherboards. After buying my last AM4 board I’m seriously looking at going solo and making my own PC motherboard. Just disappointed at the chip set design choices so I might make something more industrial like, and similar to when the chip set manufacturers couldn’t keep up when I designed the first board that broke the 500Mhz CPU barrier.