FriendlyELEC-Forum

Hey,
I have the Nanopi M4 with the SATA hat running Armbian and having booting issues.
The Nanopi M4 refuses to boot with four 3.5" HDD's connected at once, if i remove any of the four anmd only use three HDD's it boots just fine. The M4 is being supplied with 12v with up to 8A available. I have no idea the issue, when 4 HDD's connected the red LED is on but no other activity occurs.
Any ideas?

Have tried:
A: Different power source 12v 5A / 12v 8A
B: Changed HDD configuration, Sata power and data
C: Different HDD

The HDD's being used are "WD 4tb WD40EFRX"

Have you connected to the UART pins (between the USB ports) to monitor the boot log? What's it say?

If your next question is "how do i do that?" well...
I use a FTDI FT232RL based DSD TECH SH-U09C2 and set the jumper to 3v3. I use `screen` from my linux-based daily-driver. Connect to the debug pins (match them correctly, swap rx/tx), plug in the usb, connect to the tty (command below), then boot up the M4 to watch the messages.

Probably voltage drop from current spike while HDD's spin-on causes problems with boot. Try to separate power source for HDD's and for NanoPi