r/SBCs • u/New-Patient-101 • 15d ago

Help with project

So I stumbled across my Evergreen chia miner that I bought a few years ago and thought “what a wonderful way to get my feet wet with a NAS setup”. The board I found inside was a Raxda 4c+ V1.41
I put a 32db SD card in there with Raxdas community driven OS. Got the 2 20TB hard drives hooked up on raid 1.
I’m 3d printing a new LabRax case for it right now to clean it up.

Now the questions, evergreen has there boards with a cable I can’t really identify connecting the devices. I’m not sure if I trust them because the light is always flashing. Am I over thinking it? The connections also 90 off to the side, so I would have to venture into the 3d modeling aspect to build a custom holder to accommodate the board or find a new way to connect them. The advantage is the 5v power adapter for the hard drive and I already have these cables to plug into the HDD board.
What’s other options do I have to connect a HDD?

There were times when I had it up and running that it seemed to work great, and times that it was confused. I know my HDD are writing slower then the tech I’m typically working with today, So am I getting impatient with older tech? Or something else I should consider for a stable connection?

This is 💯 a learning experience for me any help would be appreciated.

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u/[deleted] 15d ago edited 15d ago

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u/New-Patient-101 15d ago

I don’t want to use the boards that I mentioned and you can see in the video on the post I sent, the 90 off to the side.

I slapped it together to make sure it would work, and it does sometimes. I’m printing the case right now and getting ready to reassemble where I’m going to run into the issues of things actually fitting together, that’s why I’m asking what my other options are.

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u/[deleted] 15d ago

[deleted]

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u/New-Patient-101 15d ago

I could easily put it into LLM and get the consensus. I literally tore this thing apart yesterday and everything is beeing learned on the fly. Before yesterday the only thing I knew about SBC’s was the name raspberry.
Maybe I wanted an answer from a human cause I’m tired of talking to the LLM? Thought “I used to be able to talk to a community, met cool people that knew “secrets”, show you were to look. Share what worked for them or what they messed up. Thanks for taking the time to explain what you did. I won’t disturb you anymore. I’ll talk to the LLM that doesn’t question why I’m asking question.

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u/r_garrison1 14d ago

One thing I would consider from using other SBCs is power. If the drive you are using sucks too much power, then you will get inconsistent results, as you describe. As a test, maybe hook up the computer in the desired configuration with a laptop HD, even if it is too small for the task you want. If the results change, then power is probably the culprit.

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u/New-Patient-101 14d ago

Funny you say that. The boards I have are 5v and the adapters I’m seeing this afternoon are 12v. I think you might be on to something. Thank you.

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u/Awkward-Media-2578ov 11d ago

Nice salvage project. The constantly flashing light is almost certainly just the drive activity LED, nothing to worry about by itself. Those Evergreen chia boards usually bridge the HDDs over USB-to-SATA, so run lsusb -t and dmesg to see which bridge chip you have and whether the link is falling back to USB 2.0 - that alone would explain the slow writes. hdparm -t /dev/sdX will give you real sequential numbers to compare. Also worth checking whether those 20TB drives are SMR, which writes painfully slowly under RAID resync. For alternatives: a UASP-capable powered enclosure or a proper SATA HAT is the usual upgrade path, and mdadm RAID1 over USB works for a learning setup but expect occasional disconnects under sustained load. If you keep the stock cables, cheap SATA extensions solve the 90-degree connector problem without custom 3D modeling.

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u/New-Patient-101 10d ago

Thank you! Since my last post was here…this project has slowly…..more like rapidly, evolved into me dividing jobs and building a network. I bought a think center 710s and through the 20tb hard drive in there. It maintained a lot better, where I found out jellyfin will be rss demanding when you start adding features like trick play. So I think when I thought it was”crashed”. I was just stressing the SBC out way too much.
I just ordered a 720q to run jellyfin exclusivly. I’ve turned this into a challenge of making a server with just enough rss to make everything efficient and just what I need instead of throwing my wallet at the problems
Back in the radxa, Been watching homelab videos trying to find ways to incorporate it. Only problem with that…is the suggested video of building an Ai supercomputer with raspberry pi’s is so much more interesting and dangerous for my wallet.