SSD experiments

[hawsey]

I just bought one of these for £24



And one of these cables for about £7

StarTech.com USB 3.0 to 2.5" SATA III Hard Drive Adapter Cable w/ UASP - SATA to USB 3.0 Converter for SSD/HDD - Hard Drive Adapter Cable https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00HJZJI84/ ... uxbG22TSQ5

The above for the purposes of Joggler experiments

First off the SSD wouldn't show on my PC so I had to partition it .
Straight in to BuZz's Excellent Xubuntu to test and it felt very snappy after booting up , I launched Kodi which opened up almost instantaneous and all looked good .

I also dug out a XP Mevi build and this too seemed much quicker booting and in operation than with my quickest memory stick .
I launched Squeezeplay and this seemed snappy enough also .

The final resting place for the SSD if all goes well will be as my Squeezeplay OS with LMS and Plex MS server but i will have some fun with it first ....

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[dwl99]

These USB to SATA adapters are very handy, I've used a USB2 version for a couple of years now. I can't believe how cheap these SSDs are getting, I just bought the same SSD for my in-laws' PC.

[hawsey]

Are you using yours on a Joggler ?
My Daughter has just given me her laptop to sort , I might get one for that , only problem is it has a 400Gig HDD at the mo , I wonder if I could shrink it on to one of these , she has all her stuff on USB sticks

This SSD seems so much faster booting the Efi Joggler Os than the 32gb Sandisk fit which in theory should be able to max out the read / write on a Joggler as it is USB 3 .


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[dwl99]

No, my various SSDs are nestling inside laptops & PCs. I have a Raspberry Pi2 with a 2TB 2.5" old-fashioned HDD and it streams all my media via Plex & Logitech Media Server. I guess I could use a SSD but it's plenty fast as it is and much better than the WD MyBook Live it replaced.

[pete]

Very nice hawsey!

Here moved to a 120Gb .m2 SATA drive for my current automation server. It is about 1/2 the size of the mSATA type of drives.

The old USB to SSD drives that I used inside of the Joggler seemed always more robust than the USB stick for running an OS.

[mangodan2003]

I've managed to hardwire a 32GB msata SSD to one the tiny usb-sata adaptors using a chopped up length of SATA cable and squeeze the whole lot inside the joggler - needs a bit of work as the screen won't quite go on atm but think should be possible with a bit of effort.

[hawsey]

Good stuff I've not had the case off the one above that I got yet but it might be worth a try ...
Have you any photos ?
Did you take out the wireless card ?

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[mangodan2003]

Sure - was actually easy to host a video than a photo so here goes..

https://youtu.be/tfx0JEQHvJY

This joggler (I have 4 ) has a couple of other mods too, additional 2 USB ports and FW hack (replaced O2 logo)

Any queries just ask.

[pete]

Very nice!

Here early joggler days fitted early SSD/ZIF/USB inside on the left over the wireless USB stick.

This was using a 1.3/1.5 inche SSD to ZIF. The ZIF to USB used a mini USB port. I tucket that device under the board on the left and the tiny USB wires ran to the middle of the board. Later used the ones in cases and just cut the wires and passed them through the holes in the back and hot melt glued the SSD drive to the back of the Joggler.

Today just utilize the pata ZIF port to a 15 cm cable folding it such that the ZIF SSD fits over the USB Wireless.

I would suggest also to upgrade the Realtek NIC with firmware as it is naked. That said once you do this you can do a remote suspend / WOL to the Joggler (in linux).

Last tinkering test was to take a Joggler with me on a weekend trip. I configured the Jogglers now to do IPSec tunnels. I used it as a bedside tabletop touchscreen talking to the automation mothership at home using a tethered smart phone LTE connection (which I left on while in the hotel room).

[Juggler]

Very nice!

I would suggest also to upgrade the Realtek NIC with firmware as it is naked. That said once you do this you can do a remote suspend / WOL to the Joggler (in linux).

Pete

This sounds very interesting. Do you have some more details ?

Going to experiment with POE soon, so these features would be very useful, I think...

Thanks

[mangodan2003]

also interested in this - less so the WOL capabilities as my jogglers are always on but the MAC address thing is annoying in that whenever I bother to update the system on them I have to take care of preserving it or amending my dhcp reservations.

flashrom lists a nicrealtek programmer which doesn't list the exact device in the joggler but would probably work with a bit of tinkering..

[hawsey]

Pete , do you fancy doing a tutorial to hack the ROM to SeaBios , do the Realtek Mac address thing then flash back to Efi ?
I think that's what folks are needing here

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[pete]

Yes; will repost some pictures of my tinkering.

Here is the post and image file for the MAC NIC ROM writing stuff. The USB stick just boots to DR DOS and is old command line DOS stuff.

http://www.jogglerwiki.com/forum/viewto ... f=4&t=2301

For the USB to motherboard wires here used very thin 22/24 gauge wire. Two wires to the motherboard for a USB 2.0 connection with two wires to the side port for powering the USB new port.

Today I run my irrigation software (many years now) on an old Seagate Dockstar Debian (mini Pogo Plug). It is using two USB / SSD drives and hasn't failed now in about 5 years or so. The software runs a cron job every night copying the irrigation software stuff to the second drive.

There is a lot of space there by the USB wireless stick. If you utilize a smaller one you can have more space; except for the antenna stuff.

The object of all of it is to close the case without putting any physical pressure on the LCD.

Here Buzz's Wiki defined the physical Realtek chip via Linux searches. If you have the Joggler apart you can read the NIC chip model number.

The issue of the naked ROM was brought up during the Seabios discussions and related Realtek ROM programmer. The programmer only works with Realtek chips and ID's the chip then loads up a base ROM to it. That was the issue with the original Linux implementation using Ubuntu and Squeezebox. You had to spoof a MAC address which did work but it would be lost on powering off the Joggler.

Newest Joggler / Openpeak endeavor was to install and connect a thin 5 port USB hub to the back of the Joggler, RTC with battery (connected to the GPIO pins on the Joggler, SSD and keeping the Wireless stick in place. It was a bit crowded but I could close the case. I could only get the RTC to work in Linux doing some bit banging and couldn't get it to work in Windows with Seabios. Most difficult was the soldering of hair thin wires to the GPIO pins. Here used hot melt glue over the soldered areas.

Personally I would search for an OpenPeak Joggler as they include a massive heatsink between the motherboard and back of the case and a ZIF pata clip, DECT chip and Zigbee chip. The Zigbee and DECT chip are connected serially to the motherboard.

Way back purchased TP-Link POE power splitters for the Joggler. These provide 3 DC voltages with one being 5VDC. It is plug n play except for the POE splitter which you can velcro to the back of the Joggler. POE switches are a dime a dozen and very reasonably priced these days. (small 4 port and large 24 port POE switches and midspan injectors).

[pete]

Pete , do you fancy doing a tutorial to hack the ROM to SeaBios , do the Realtek Mac address thing then flash back to Efi ?

I put everything here on a bootable USB stick. You don't need the bootable part for writing the seabios and the seabios includes a rom writer on boot to go back to the EFI boot bio

I will write something with more detail. I have done it so many times it lodged in my noggin these days.

This should be in the hardware section though.

Need to put in in the Joggler Wiki.

The meat is:

1 - create a bootable DOS BIOS stick.
2 - put the Realtek NIC chip writer on it with the configurations for the Joggler and Openpeak stuff.
3 - put the seabios rom and original Joggler EFI bios on the same USB stick.
4 - write the updated Joggler Firmware to the Joggler using birdslikewires reflash system with the openpeak firmware 30300 on it. It is automatic and works well.
5 - boot joggler regular from the build in MMC with no USB stick.
6 - SSH to the DHCP address. Plug in your newly created boot usb stick
7 - do the mod fh thing.
8 - save the current EFI boot rom to the USB stick
9 - write the seabios rom to the joggler
===================================================
A - cd /mnt
B - ls
C - there is the original seabios coreboot.rom file downloaded in the boot stick image
D - modprobe fh
E - write the original Joggler EFI boot ROM to the stick
F - dd if=/dev/fh of=/mnt/originaljogglerbootefi.rom bs=1024k * call the original boot rom file anything you want or remember.
G - write the new seabios ROM to the Joggler
H - dd if=/mnt/coreboot.rom of=/dev/fh count=1 bs=1024k
I - both times you will see:
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
J - to get back from the Seabios ROM to the Joggler ROM is easy
K - A new cold boot in Seabios shows two F prompts, one is F7 (rom writing) and one is F12 (think it says something else).
L - rename the saved Joggler rom to upgrade.rom on the USB stick
M - hitting the F7 the Joggler will look for the upgrade.rom file and write it back to the ROM.
N - note that is is a bit slower at doing this than the other way around. Wait a bit and you will see it check and write the rom
O - a cold boot will present the original Openpeak EFI boot ROM with booting image (Openpeak, Avaya, Cisco or whatever).
===================================================
10 - shut down and reboot the Joggler in Seabios mode with the bootable stick (use a hub for a keyboard and boot stick boot).
11 - you will be a DOS prompt. Read the command lines for the programmer. You cannot mess anything up.
12 - shut down and reboot while hitting the F7 key. It will look for a properly named rom file. Just rename the original Joggler rom file to something like upgrade.rom.
13 - you will be back to the original state of the Joggler only with a new enabled NIC ROM.
14 - you cannot toast the EFI boot rom following the step by step. If you do you can just swap it with a working Joggler ROM in VIVO, copy the rom to USB stick and write the rom back to the flash while the Joggler is powered up and opened. The CPU gets hot but not that hot. You just have to be careful not to short out the motherboard.

[mangodan2003]

I didn't read that thoroughly so I may have missed something but it seemed as if a number of the steps involve restoring and booting the stock firmware purely to use the fh module for reading/writing flashing the EFI image.

Just want to mention that any linux install can be used to both read and write the EFI without the fh module using flashrom - with the caveat that you need to download the source, make a very small change to one file and then build it.
The version i've used and the tweak required is somewhere else in this forum - just look at my post history or search flashrom.

Seen a few notes re variations between jogglers - I've noticed this too - all mine originally showed the O2 logo at boot - yet having hacked the EFI image to customise the boot logo some boot with a black/screen no logo/ where as others work as expected. Once the kernel starts all then have a working display.

[pete]

You are correct in that any of Buzz's Ubuntu builds can write any of the EFI boot roms. I do not have the original OS MMCs on many of my devices these days as I utilize the space for other OS stuff. The various boot EFI roms are all a bit different.

[pete]

Some time ago I wrote about updating Buzz's Ubuntu build from a 16Gb SSD to a 64Gb SSD. For whatever reason I couldn't get it to work. I got it working today.

[hawsey]

Does it work well ?
Is this on a USB ssd stick ? Or a one like I used ?

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[pete]

It is on a 1.8" ZIF SSD.

Here is a quickie snapshot showing the Joggler (Openpeak) booting up from a PATA SSD (MLC) drive. I am getting some disk errors and it boots really slow now. Thinking I need to low level format it and try again. The drive reads good when I connect it to my other computer via a USB cable and use GParted to check it.

ata1.00: ATA-9: STT_FET064MDRM, 20140803, max UDMA/133
ata1.00: 123731968 sectors, multi 0: LBA48
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA STT_FET064MDRM 2014 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 123731968 512-byte logical blocks: (63.3 GB/59.0 GiB)
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
sda: sda1 sda2 sda3
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk

ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
ata1: soft resetting link
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/33
ata1.00: device reported invalid CHS sector 0
ata1: EH complete
ata1: lost interrupt (Status 0x58)
ata1.00: limiting speed to PIO4
ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
ata1.00: failed command: WRITE DMA
ata1.00: cmd ca/00:08:00:f8:10/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 4096 out
res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
ata1: soft resetting link
ata1.00: configured for PIO4
ata1.00: device reported invalid CHS sector 0
ata1: EH complete
udevd[378]: starting version 175
EXT4-fs (sda3): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro

Tested again with a 16Gb SSD drive. This one created a FAT32 partition for the EFI boot rather than a FAT16 partition.

Worked.

ata1.00: ATA-8: SanDisk pSSD-P2 16GB, SSD 5.20, max UDMA/133
ata1.00: 31277232 sectors, multi 0: LBA48
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA SanDisk pSSD-P2 SSD PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 31277232 512-byte logical blocks: (16.0 GB/14.9 GiB)
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
sda: sda1 sda2 sda3
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk
Refined TSC clocksource calibration: 1329.993 MHz.
Switching to clocksource tsc

Trying again with the 64 Gb SSD after doing a low level format.

Found this program to give it a try.

http://www.hdat2.com/

Worked great!

I used it on another 16Gb SSD drive that went bad on me a couple of years ago and it brought it back to life.

In a quickie recap

1 - Using Buzz's Ubuntu build V.13 here (V.14 and V.14 do not see the PATA port)
2 - using Linux image writing wrote Buzz's image to the 64Gb SSD.
3 - copied out the EFI boot files.
4 - deleted FAT16 partition and moved stuff over to make it a 300Mb FAT32 EFI boot parition.
5 - created a 300 Mb FAT32 partition for EFI booting and just copied over the boot files and changed the name of the root partition to linux-rootSSD

Grub.cfg looks like this: (changed it cuz I was testing the booting with USB sticks and other USB connected devices).

loadfont /unicode.pf2
terminal_output gfxterm
set timeout=5
menuentry "Xubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty) - 3.2.71joggler1" {
linux /vmlinuz-3.2.71joggler1 root=LABEL=linux-rootssd ro quiet splash
initrd /initrd.img-3.2.71joggler1
}

6 - Connected to ZIF PATA port.

7 - Boots fine now from the 64Gb SSD.

8 - side stuff here ...trying to shrink down Buzz's 2Gb Ubuntu basic build to install on the MMC. I have it right now at 1Gb and booting but it is still too big.

[pete]

BTW the low level format and secure wipe of the 64Gb SSD connected to my laptop via a USB cable took around 5 hours to do in DOS mode via the DOS boot USB stick. The software is very nice and detailed (intuitive). The older software I had expected the user to know those granular details about what a hard drive is all about (1990's style). The thing today with SSD's are security bits and pieces embedded in the drive like a little computer.

BTW #2 - lost one 16Gb testing SSD when repeated zif clipping made the zif clip fall off.