Installing a second hard drive in Bubba!

[Magnus]

***WARNING!!! OPENING YOUR BUBBA MEANS YOUR GUARANTEE IS VOIDED***

The PSU delivered with Bubba does not have the correct specification for supplying enough power to both hard drives. You should have a PSU with the following spec: 12V DC, 4A, centre pin positive. A failed PSU will not be replaced if an additional hard drive has been mounted.


If you have soldering skills and are bored with only one hard drive you might want to try this!
The disk is not actually mounted in Bubba, it is outside Bubba

The two hard drives should be strapped as �cable select�. After hw installation, log in as root and mount the hard drive.

1. Open your Bubba and solder a extra 2*20 pin header to the PCB.

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2. Solder a hard drive power cord to the PCB, as shown in picture.

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3. Attach a IDE cable to the new connector on Bubba as shown in picture.

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4. Connect the IDE cable and the power cord to the new hard drive.

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5. Final result!

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Remember not to try this if you are the least unsure of what you are doing!!!

Enjoy!
/Magnus

[msx]

cool, great hack!

i got the 500GB version so i don't think i'll need a second HD for some time, but in the future, who knows
BTW, did you find some informations about the board inside the bubba? maybe there's some other useful stuff like serial or i2c ports..

[Magnus]

There is a way to connect a serial port to the PCB, but you need a few external components as well. We will post a description of that in a near future!

BR
Magnus

[John W]

Nicely done Magnus. Thumbs up.

[raven]

Could this be a way to achieve RAID capability?
True, it would have to be a software/driver based RAID (I've had som bad experiences of those, as compared to dedicated RAID cards), but its maybe better than nothing...

[Magnus]

Could this be a way to achieve RAID capability?
True, it would have to be a software/driver based RAID (I've had som bad experiences of those, as compared to dedicated RAID cards), but its maybe better than nothing...

Yes you can use software based RAID. It would probably be very slow...

/Magnus

[dengamle]

very cool hack

[Nöbbe]

Can you connect two harddrives on the IDE-cable? Or is there only support for one disk..

[pa]

You can use two drives on the same cable.

/PA

[Nöbbe]

Would the internal 12V->5V converter manage 3 disks? What are the ratings of the internal converter?

[johannes]

The 12 -> 5V converter is designed for 5V, 1.6A, whereof:

650 mA HDD
300 mA CPU, memory and other electronics
500 mA USB host
150 mA spare
===
1600 mA

Disks (Seagate barracudas) are specified at 638 mA @ 5V maximum, but our estimations are that they never should exceed 500 mA at 5V in our application.

Thus, if you don't use the USB host for anything using it's power, you should probably be OK with three disks. There is margins in all the calculations above. If you try, we recommend you measuring the 5V to check for dips, and keep an eye on the temperatures of LM2676 (the 5V switcher) and it's inductance (cylindrical, next to the USB host connector on the bottom side). If they burn your finger when you touch, they are probably too hot.

[gb]

I just set up a RAID-1 array on the bubba, it seem to work, just a bit slow...

I gave up on trying to install a "full" raid system, including the root partition, and instead only added a third mirrored partition mounted as /home. Full instructions can be found here.



hope it helps...

giovanni

[msx]

hello it looks like passing to the new sites some picture directories went lost.. can it be ripristinated?

[Magnus]

Everything restored