Yeah that is true, Im just thinking long term and remote, Not really sure what the issue with the start up is other then the spin up time, or the fact the drive turns off everytime not really sure I dont think I ever had an issue with rebooting with mine with an external drive. But if power is stuck on I think it would eliminate the issue all together. Unless of course it needs the usb power to trigger the power of the drive. Which then maybe a powered usb hub would fix that issue.
Hard shut down and powered on restart (unsure)
Drive always come on correctly with white light.
Graceful power off and restart (unsure)
Nearly same thing as above as after poweroof command I need to unplug and plug it back to start it.
But after each power off there is a Starting file system check on this drive
Hot reboot (fail)
What’s difference from Hard shut? 
Cold boot with drive powered on first
No issues…
Cold boot with drive powered on just after Pi4 powered on --but before drive mount.
Drives powers on fine, white light is coming , there is a file system check on drive…
System start normally
Booted and running Pi and then plugged in USB drive and mount -a command issued.
[Tue Apr 21 04:37:36 2020] usb 2-2: USB disconnect, device number 2
[Tue Apr 21 04:37:47 2020] usb 2-2: new SuperSpeed Gen 1 USB device number 3 using xhci_hcd
[Tue Apr 21 04:37:47 2020] usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1058, idProduct=25a3, bcdDevice=10.29
[Tue Apr 21 04:37:47 2020] usb 2-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[Tue Apr 21 04:37:47 2020] usb 2-2: Product: Elements 25A3
[Tue Apr 21 04:37:47 2020] usb 2-2: Manufacturer: Western Digital
[Tue Apr 21 04:37:47 2020] usb 2-2: SerialNumber: 39524B4A5942524C
[Tue Apr 21 04:37:47 2020] usb-storage 2-2:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[Tue Apr 21 04:37:47 2020] scsi host0: usb-storage 2-2:1.0
[Tue Apr 21 04:37:48 2020] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access WD Elements 25A3 1029 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[Tue Apr 21 04:37:48 2020] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
[Tue Apr 21 04:37:48 2020] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Spinning up disk…
[Tue Apr 21 04:37:49 2020] …ready
[Tue Apr 21 04:38:06 2020] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Very big device. Trying to use READ CAPACITY(16).
[Tue Apr 21 04:38:06 2020] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 27344699392 512-byte logical blocks: (14.0 TB/12.7 TiB)
[Tue Apr 21 04:38:06 2020] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 4096-byte physical blocks
[Tue Apr 21 04:38:06 2020] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[Tue Apr 21 04:38:06 2020] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 47 00 10 08
[Tue Apr 21 04:38:06 2020] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] No Caching mode page found
[Tue Apr 21 04:38:06 2020] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Assuming drive cache: write through
[Tue Apr 21 04:38:06 2020] sda: sda1
[Tue Apr 21 04:38:06 2020] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk
#mount -a
[Tue Apr 21 04:38:35 2020] EXT4-fs (sda1): recovery complete
[Tue Apr 21 04:38:35 2020] EXT4-fs (sda1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)
Have you tried to boot from usb 2.0 to see if maybe it gets power sooner?
Yes I did tried it on usb2 and usb3
On a laptop with Linux Mint problem doesn’t exist…
I’ll look for other linux for Rpi4 and install it to check…
Have you tried Ubuntu server?
I checking it now Ubuntu 19.10 64bit
It working fine on Ubuntu 19.10 server 64bit so fault was caused by Raspbian system.
Each time after reboot it do file system check but I don’t mind it takes less than one minute
To load lubuntu desktop it take ages… but at the end destkop environment will be removed…
1 Like
So this is very interesting. After having claimed that I’ve never had this issue, which I haven’t on my first RPi 4 (4GB) node with 10TB USB3.0 WD Elements HDD (dedicated power supply), I just received a brand new RPi4 (4GB) and 12TB USB 3.0 WD Elements HDD (dedicated power supply) I am now seeing this issue…
Makes me wonder if something is going on with the HDD itself…I’ve had the 10TB HDD going since Dec 2019 and no problems with that one what so ever. Just received the 12TB HDD a couple of days ago, so I wonder if something has changed since then. The Node1 Rpi4 was ordered in July 2019 and Node2 Rpi4 was just received a couple of days ago as well, but I don’t believe there were any major changes in the boards since then to now…
I even thought perhaps the difference of Node1 HDD was formated to ntfs (as I copied all data from a WD My Passport HDD on a windows computer) and Node2 HDD is going to serve as HDD for a brand new node, so I formatted to ext4 and then saw that this was an issue when rebooting. So thought, since I don’t have anything on the HDD yet, I’ll format to ntfs and see if that makes a difference, and it didn’t.
Node2 is going to be sitting right next to Node1 on my desk at home when Node1 fills up, so it’s not nearly the issue that the OP was asking about, but really confusing why this is an issue.
Which OS were you having the issue on?
Oh, sorry, I had already mentioned above when responding to OP. Both RPi4’s are running raspbian
Oh ok so it started happening on your new rpi4? then maybe something to do with an updated version of raspbian, I run rpi4 as well but I run with ubuntu server with no issues.
both Node1 and Node2 are running the same raspbian version…and Node1 has never had this issue.
Oh thats super weird then…I wonder with the later rpi4 releases if the quality got worse.
I think it could be aggressive power saving feature on the new WD. Or it could be SMR and should have more time to wake-up
Hum…if I wanted to try something out for “more time to wake up,” how would I go about doing that?
Another variable could be that Node1 is a V1.1 RPi4 (4GB) and Node2 is a V1.2 RPi4 (4GB). I know they made some minor changes between the first release version and the latest one, although I thought that revision change was only around a USB-C power issue…
1 Like
Well usb-c is power delivery though if they changed something with that it could change when usbs power on during the start up causing even more delay. I was actually thinking of buying another rpi4 but a 2gig version I might not now…
2 Likes