Odroid HC2, HDD and questions

  • are you saying that the CPU freq is variable ? how ?


    Like @tkaiser has already explained.



    I personally use default settings. And the situation with 600 / 600Mhz suits me. My HC1 spends most of time at idle and only sometimes big cores jump to 2Ghz for a few moments. Personally, I do not feel the need to set 1.4 / 1.6Ghz.
    It's different when I use Kodi as an audio player, so I run it only on three little cores and leave the rest alone. Does it affect temperature and power consumption? I do not know, maybe and maybe not....

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    I had some problems with HC2 when transferring huge amount of data from an attached USB drive (NTFS) to the internal drive (btrfs with compression). I reduced the CPU frequency and the overheating was solved. After that I switched back to the standard values and did not face temperature problems since then. So I assume it was the combination of high CPU load and USB, but did not dig deeper.

  • Hello


    So I installed my OMV on HC2:


    I just needed:
    - Odroid HC2 +power supply
    - SD card (Samsung Extreme A2 64 GB)
    - HDD (Seagate Ironwolf 3.5" 4 TB)
    - RJ45 network cable


    Securing the disk in the box with the supplied screws, flashing the OMV image to the card, inserting the card into the device and then boot it is just a matter of a few minutes: thanks to all the developers ! :thumbup:


    My question here: I read that it's best to choose the card size larger than what is needed, to minimize prematurate wear and tear. But in the end the system partition is a bit less than 8 GB, does this mean that the unpartitioned space will never be used ?


    As for the HDD spindown issues, I first observed the same behavior as @Adoby, namely that with everyhting unchanged out of the box, the HDD would spindown very quickly, and it was not clear whether the OMV HDD settings (or the hdparm command in command line) would have the expected effect.


    Following @Adoby I flashed the HC2 firmware with the Odroid tool, setting the spindown time to 30'. I got the confirmation message, but in the end after this step the HDD would never spindown.


    The good news is that now the HDD correctly responds to the OMV settings in the GUI. So I finally set the spindown time to 20', leaving all the other settings to blank, and I'm happy with it.


    I could measure the power consumption with a power meter. My observations seem consistent with @tkaiser 's tests:
    - with HDD standby (spindown), 3.7W
    - with HDD fully running, with no or light activity (e.g. a single reading of a media file): less than 8W
    - with full NAS activity (transfer hundreds of GB's to a single client): about 11W


    Very nice ! :)


    The HDD temperature (in the GUI) never exceeded 39°C (no fan, the NAS is placed in a semiclosed TV bench).


    I confirm the transfer rate (in both directions) of about ~100 MB/s for large files.


    The only small issue I have is related to the HDD standby mode. In this mode there is a delay when accessing the NAS from any machine on the network, this is perfectly normal and expected. However when I want to read a movie from Kodi (I use an AndroidTV box, namely the Xiaomi MiBox), this small delay sometimes causes Kodi to freeze forever. The problem is not systematic, but I couldn't figure out what are the conditions to observe this freezing (HDD standby mode for sure, but what else ?), nor whether it's related to Kodi, AndroidTV, the Mibox or a combination of all these guys. It does not seem to occur with audio files.


    I switched on the "Wake-on-Lan" Kodi setting but it has not effect (which I believe is normal, as the OMV system itself is always awake).

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    Flash memory wear out. You can only write/erase the memory locations a limited number of times. Also if you only write a small amount of data a much larger number of memory locations may have to be erased and rewritten to the card. Write amplification.


    Wear leveling is one way to handle this. Data is rewritten to new locations in a round-robin fashion.


    Overprovisioning is another way. To have a bigger card than is needed. Then the wear leveling becomes much more effective.


    If you try to make use of the unused memory on the card you will reduce how effective the wear leveling can be.


    I prefer to use 32 GB cards. But if I should buy new cards now it might be SanDisk Ultra 64GB A1.


    But I suspect that as long as you make sure not to store variable, frequently updated, data on the card, the flash plugin will make sure that there are very few writes to the card, and it will last a very long time even if it has little unused space left for wear leveling.


    For instance, make sure to not have the docker base path on the SD card! Same if you use home directories or have other software that use frequently updated databases or often update metadata or other stuff. Don't store the home directory, databases or metadata on the SD card!

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    I flashed the HC2 firmware with the Odroid tool, setting the spindown time to 30'. I got the confirmation message, but in the end after this step the HDD would never spindown.

    If I remember well, after flashing the firmware you need to shut down the HC2, pull the power supply, wait for 30s and reboot.

  • Is there a capacitor or something, so that a short unplug is not enough for a fully cold boot ?


    Anyway I did cold reboot several times since the first installation, so it should be OK, I will check the firmware version.


    As for my problem of Kodi freezing when accessing the OMV data disk in standby mode, I found a workaround using Kodi settings:


    - enable the setting "update library on startup"
    - set the "Shutdown function timer" equal to the HDD spindown time
    - set the "Shutdown function" to "Quit'


    In this configuration, after some inactivity Kodi fully quits, even if the device is itself sleeping (at least this is the case for the MiBox).


    Then at the next use, Kodi starts with a library update, that scans the disk for new files. In this way the disk wakes up with no freezing. The scan itself is sufficiently fast so that this is not a problem for the user. Then one can play media files.

  • Is there a capacitor or something, so that a short unplug is not enough for a fully cold boot

    A reboot is by definition something entirely different than a cold boot (with SBC we run into a bunch of different problems caused by warm boots compared to cold boot, e.g. voltage regulators in a state left when rebooting instead of being at default voltages and so on).


    Cold boot: power off, check whether device is really powered down (if not disconnect PSU), wait at least 10 seconds, power on again :)

  • Sorry to resurrect this thread, but I have just installed a new hard drive in my HC2 and am also thinking about upgrading from OMV4 to OMV5 in the near future (unless anyone thinks that this is a bad idea).


    I used to use a 6TB WD Red but have since replaced this with a 14TB drive, "shucked" from this:


    https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-El…=14tb+%2Caps%2C341&sr=8-1


    It is working absolutely fine but for the fact that I am finding that the new drive is noisier and runs slightly hotter than the Red - I believe that these 14TB are in fact White Labels, as opposed to Reds. The slightly warmer hard drive seems to be pushing the HC2's CPU into the red.


    The first thing that I am going to try is turn the HC2 over and place it on a rubber mat (as was suggested by Adoby).


    This should, hopefully, help dampen the noise and also drop the temperature a bit, with the heatsink being upwards, rather than below.


    It was also suggested that messing with /etc/default/cpufrequtils can also reduce temperatures


    Is it worth me doing this as well? In addition to using the HC2 as a NAS, I also use it for TVHeadend - would I need this extra speed?


    Another thing is the spindown issue that seems to affect Ironwolfs and and WD Reds - as mine is not "technically" a Red, should I consider seeing whether OMV might be able to control spindown again?


    Also, further to this

    Here is the link for the FW update:
    https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-xu4/software/jms578_fw_update


    and here one for disk parking:
    https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid…eshooting/shutdown_script
    @Adoby are you using this script? Any experience to share?


    am I thinking that the latest HC2 firmware update means that you do not have to bother with the disk parking script anymore on a new install?

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