Umbrel not recognizing SSD

Support and Troubleshooting
1

I’m trying to get Umbrel set up and it keeps hanging up on the external drive with the message of:

Error: No external drive found

Please connect an external drive (at least 1TB) to a USB 3.0 port (blue color) on your Raspberry Pi and restart your Umbrel.

I purchased a brand new SanDisk Extreme 1b SSD (up to 1050 mb/s read, 1000 mb/s write). I plugged it into the blue usb port and again, nothing.

Any thoughts on a fix before I return the drive and give up on this project? I’m running a RPi 4 as well.

Thanks.

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2

I had a similar issue using an older WD disk I had. Just reflashed the sdcard Umbrel image and installed in less than 5 mins. Awesome piece of work, don’t give up. It’s really impressive !

3

Tried twice. Doesn’t fix it. This is a brand new ssd bought specifically for this and never used anywhere else.

4

If it matters, the SSD is powered off the cable that’s plugged into the Raspberry Pi. The Pi is powered off the USB-C cable plugged into the wall. Could there be an issue with power?

5

Im having the same issue. I think the Pi is bad? Ive switched ssd cases and cords. Same issue. It will run for 3 to 20 min, then my sync crashes to zero percent. Very frustrating

6

I was having a similar issue with umbrel booting and then crashing after a few minutes. Reflashing didn’t help, but what fixed it was using a different case for the SSD. I have an external ssd dock that is USB and put the SSD drive in that. It is externally powered rather than powered over usb on Pi. That fixed it and umbrel has been running fine since. I have one of the recommended ssd case from the umbrel site coming soon. Hoping that fixes the issue. When I built the node a few months back - I bought all of the parts from the website, but the SSD enclosure was not available, so I got what I thought was similar enough. I suspect different enclosures have different power draws which was causing the SSD mount to fail. The issue for me only happened after upgrading to Umbrel 0.4.0. My set up ran fine for 3 months before this past week I had issues.

Try a different enclosure or one that has its own power.

7

I had the same issue with the recommended case being out of stock. I just received the correct one today and things are still acting up.

I am toying with the idea of switching to an externally powered SSD, but I don’t have a lot of spare change to be replacing ssds.

I’ve been running good now for 17 min. Almost at 70%synced now on day 6…lol

8

My system kept crashing. I kept restarting. It was not fun. I replaced the SSD case with this cable:
SATA to USB Cable, Benfei USB 3.0 to SATA III Hard Driver Adapter Compatible for 2.5 inch HDD and SSD. So now the Pi connects directly to drive. No cash on hard drive.
And it’s working like a dream! Can’t thank you guys enough. Great job!! That cable is $10 on Amazon. Came next day and bingo!

9

I have the same Sandisk SSD and it worked. i would try not putting anything into your USB plug other than the SSD USB. and use the normal power plug

10

I have a 3.0 to sata cable on order from crucial. I hope that will do the trick. I will follow up

11

This finally worked. I have no idea what was different or the cause of the issues. It hung on starting up overnight and when I woke it was synching.

I wish I had a better solution to share…

12

Also, formatting the SSD to the correct format (Ext4) is SUPER IMPORTANT but a step which I feel is missing from the installation instructions. I followed the User Guide step by step but completely missed formatting, thinking that it would be included in the boot sequence.

To help total noobs I think it would be useful to mention the formatting required for the SSD/HDD before booting Umbrel.

I changed an enclosure to a cable, reformatted my SSD and rebooted Umbrel and we’re syncing (55% in 4 days)…

Looking now at the quickest and least power-sapping SDDs. In hindsight, I should have maybe gone for an NVMI M2 style SSD with an extension board - wish I had know this was an option before buying my Crucial MX500.

13

Yes, correct format of SSD is ext4.
But that is done also when you install first time Umbrel.
So if the drive is brand new (no partitions) it will be formatted in ext4 in the process.
Formatting it in ext4 from the beggining it doesn’t hurt, but users should keep in mind: do not format it in NTFS or using Windows systems. That will make unusable the disk and you will need to re-format it in ext4.
In the troubleshooting manual there’s a procedure mentioned (for when you want to copy the blockchain data from another source) about how to use ext4 disks on Windows.

14

y know? I still appreciate what you shared a lot. I have the same problem here. The system tells me that the SSD is okay, but the website still says: NO (Please connect an external drive (at least 1TB) to a USB 3.0 port (blue color) on your Raspberry Pi and restart your Umbrel.)

I hope tomorrow when I wake up I will has the same result like you ^^

15

In the beginning, I had lots of those problems with external drive, files corruption, etc, and found problems both in USB cable and USB to SATA adaptor.
If you decide to do a new clean install, before it, ask and i can show you simple tests to verify those parts.

1 Like
17

Sorry for the issue!

For @n080dy and The Bitcoin Machines users, can you please confirm if everything is connected correctly as per the instructions on this article here?

19

HD is not suitable to this project. Recommended use SSD.
You need a sata-to-usb3 adapter (external disc case) to test the SSD.
With it, writing files and testing write speeds to the SSD gives hints what is the bad part.

21

Do you have a spare sata adapter (case) to test directly the Rasp Pi to the SSD, bypass the machine internal sata chip?
Or verify if you can test the internal sata chip, plugging the internal sata adapter to a PC with a usb3 cable? (to this tests cut off any power source to the internal board, unplug the usb3 connector to the Rasp Pi)

23

Before you mount ssd to machine, test the machine board with SSD in. Using a usb2 port of a PC or laptop, format the SSD, ntfs or fat32. Then write a large file to it ( 1GB or greater). Change cable to a usb3 port. Next, do a copy of the large file in the SSD to itself. Observe the copying speed. If everything is good, speed should be no less than 100MB/s and stable during copy, with no dips.
If speed dips or even stops, you may have a bad usb cable. If copy speed is stable but lower than 100MB/s, likelly the sata chip onboard is issued.
Obs. be sure test using usb3 cable and usb3 PC port, if using usb2 parts you will get lower copy speed (30MB/s or less) and issues may not appear.

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24

Umbrel will format SSD to ext4, not to care about this.

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