Can fstab be adjusted for time delay when spin-up of disk takes longer ?

[Gert]

Hello All,

To build a mini-NAS I have bought a new Seagate 5T 2.5inch disk and attached the USB to the RPI3. (Yes, it's slow and I plan to upgrade this rig to RPI4 with USB3) Seems the spin-up and self test of the disk take longer during the boot sequence than the point in time when mount is called. Thus on normal boot the disk is not mounted and missing from the file system.

Manually adding a

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mount -a 

works fine.

Question : Is there syntax in fstab to allow for a longer-than-usual spin-up of the disk?
I have seen fstab code to wait for network-up until a mount is issued. But this is a plain 'spinning-rust' device.

As a workaround (which I hope is not permanent) I've put the mounts into a crontab entry.

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@reboot sleep 30 && mount -a

My current fstab entry for the disk:

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UUID=F02E77D02E778E7A    /media/usbdisk ntfs-3g auto,user,exec,rw,nofail,noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 0

From the syslog:

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grep ' sd ' /var/log/syslog | grep '17 17'
Sep 17 17:00:47 rpi3 kernel: [    4.088699] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Spinning up disk...
Sep 17 17:00:47 rpi3 kernel: [    4.101507] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
Sep 17 17:00:47 rpi3 kernel: [   10.325987] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Very big device. Trying to use READ CAPACITY(16).
Sep 17 17:00:47 rpi3 kernel: [   10.326241] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 9767541167 512-byte logical blocks: (5.00 TB/4.55 TiB)
Sep 17 17:00:47 rpi3 kernel: [   10.336904] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
Sep 17 17:00:47 rpi3 kernel: [   10.336918] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 4f 00 00 00
Sep 17 17:00:47 rpi3 kernel: [   10.337358] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
Sep 17 17:00:47 rpi3 kernel: [   10.341385] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Very big device. Trying to use READ CAPACITY(16).
Sep 17 17:00:47 rpi3 kernel: [   10.450387] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Very big device. Trying to use READ CAPACITY(16).
Sep 17 17:00:47 rpi3 kernel: [   10.451484] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk
Sep 17 17:00:47 rpi3 kernel: [   12.247721] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] 249999360 512-byte logical blocks: (128 GB/119 GiB)
Sep 17 17:00:47 rpi3 kernel: [   12.247821] sd 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
Sep 17 17:00:47 rpi3 kernel: [   12.247938] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
Sep 17 17:00:47 rpi3 kernel: [   12.247951] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
Sep 17 17:00:47 rpi3 kernel: [   12.248268] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: disabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
Sep 17 17:00:47 rpi3 kernel: [   12.260593] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

From the lsblk:

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NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sdb           8:16   1 119.2G  0 disk 
└─sdb1        8:17   1 119.2G  0 part /media/usbstick
sda           8:0    0   4.6T  0 disk 
├─sda2        8:2    0   4.6T  0 part /media/usbdisk
└─sda1        8:1    0   128M  0 part 
mmcblk0     179:0    0  29.7G  0 disk 
├─mmcblk0p2 179:2    0  29.7G  0 part /
└─mmcblk0p1 179:1    0    63M  0 part /boot

Seems Seagate sneaked a little partition in there.

Your feedback is appreciated.

Cheers,
Gert

PS : Let me know if there are other improvement to the fstab entry.

[Andyroo]

You could try adding

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boot_delay=x

to config.txt to slow the whole boot process by ‘x’ seconds.

Try adding a file called timeout (no extension) to the /boot directory, that’s designed to add a wait in to the process for a tin disk to start to boot from.

The only other thing I have seen is the https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Autofs functions and that was on an x86 box so I’ve now idea if it’s happy on the Pi boards.

[RedPanther]

My current fstab entry for the disk:

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UUID=F02E77D02E778E7A    /media/usbdisk ntfs-3g auto,user,exec,rw,nofail,noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 0

PS : Let me know if there are other improvement to the fstab entry.

I hope I can be some help here Gert. I have a 4Tb 2.5” HDD that I have had mounted at boot on both a 3B+ and 4B

My current /etc/fstab entry for that drive looks about like this:

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PARTUUID=****************       /PiDrive/Drive01         ntfs         defaults       0   2

Use PARTUUID to specify a partition on the drive, change “ntfs-3g” to ntfs, unless you need all of the specifics for that drive to boot then set it to defaults, and change your last code number from “0” to 2 for the drive to mount at boot. 0 doesn’t mount the drive automatically, it only assigns the drive a mount link to the system at boot.

Might be worth a shot,
RP

[rpdom]

Unless you plan to use the external disk with a Windows or similar system, it would be better to reformat the partition as ext4. That will give you full Linux control over the permissions on the files and will be much faster than NTFS.

If you are going to use NTFS format, don't use "ntfs" in fstab. Use "ntfs-3g", otherwise you won't be able to write to it.

[Gert]

OK, I have put a mount -a into crontab with a 30sec wait after boot. Kind of awkward but works and nothing else is slowed down. Was just wondering if there is a flag in fstab to wait for a device to be ready (or ready+xx sec) to execute the mounting.
Cheers,
Gert

[RedPanther]

2019-09-24-135808_1280x1024_scrot.png (199.85 KiB) Viewed 300 times

I have had zero issues with read/write compatibility or speeds. Yes, my drive is also open to my iPhone, Windows 10 laptop, Ubuntu laptop, and four other Pi devices.