[fedora-arm] A20 sata power

[Timothy Krantz]

I believe the A20 chips allow for powering low power sata drives from the
board (with the appropriate connector).

I have a banana pi pro that I would like to use to power an attached SSD.

I see information on how to do that with old, pre device tree kernels but
have not found a definitive way to do that with newer kernels.

I found this :

https://firnsy.com/blog/booting-sata-with-fedora-arm-on-the-banana-pi-r1

which purports to show a patch for a similar model, but not the pro.

Does anyone have any insight?

Thanks,
Tim

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

Post by Timothy Krantz
I believe the A20 chips allow for powering low power sata drives from the
board (with the appropriate connector).
I have a banana pi pro that I would like to use to power an attached SSD.
I see information on how to do that with old, pre device tree kernels but
have not found a definitive way to do that with newer kernels.
https://firnsy.com/blog/booting-sata-with-fedora-arm-on-the-banana-pi-r1
which purports to show a patch for a similar model, but not the pro.
Does anyone have any insight?

The power connector on these boards should just work, u-boot will
enable it, and I do not think the kernel touches it atm.

So all you need is a sata cable which has a combined sata+power plug
on one end, and the normal sata-data plug + the power plug used on
your board on the other end, i.e. :

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-Shipping-Banana-Pi-SATA-cable-Banana-Pro-HDD-Cable-Banana-Pi-hard-disk-cable-Connect/32272325821.html

and a disk which will run when supplied with 5v only (all ssd-s, some
notebook hdd-s).

Note that the polarity of the power connectors is not the same on
all boards (*)! My advise is to first measure the power with a multi-meter
(you can get the ground from the shielding of a usb connector to
lower your chances of accidentally shortening the power pins),
this will tell you both the polarity and if the 5V on the connector
has been correctly enabled by u-boot / the kernel.

Regards,

Hans


*) Although if you get a cable specifically for you board you
should be good.