Bill wrote:

A friend has a need for a high speed external drive to read CD's as fast
as possible. It plugs into a Raspberry Pi based device

is this the brennan player again?

He bought a non-usb powered LG GE24NU40 from Amazon UK, which was
shipped from the USA. After about 2 weeks it has failed. He called
Amazon, who said it would have to be posted back to Kentucky at his
cost. If they agreed it was faulty, his costs would be refunded.
The Post Office have told him the postage cost would be over £20, so he
is now considering his options.

sounds like it was sold *on* amazon, but not sold *by* amazon.

He has tried an external usb powered drive, but that is nowhere the same
speed and looking at the drive in it, it is the same model as in my
ancient Lenovo T410 laptop. The LG drive is rated at 48x for CD's.

48x is about 7.5 megabytes/sec, USB2 speed it 60megabytes/sec, so even
with the rPi's single USB hub bottleneck, it ought to handlre reading as
fast as the drive can, where's it getting written to? if it's network or
another USB disk, that's got to get through the same single bottleneck too.

I have had him check the psu that came with the drive, and it is rated
for 110 to 240 volts. The drawer opens and closes, but no CD's are
detected. I have got him looking for his CD cleaning disk.


Do you mean no CD's are detected, or no CD drives are detected,

boot the Pi, do a "dmesg -c" plug in the USB CD, then do another dmesg,
and see if you get messages about /dev/sdc being detected and used as a
CD drive etc.

I suggested he looked for a UK source of a similar drive, but no-one
seems to sell anything but usb powered ones now.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a decent high speed non-usb powered
external drive? I don't want to suggest buying a case and internal
drive, as I'd have to drive over to him to assemble it.

Get a microSATA (9+7pin) to SATA (15+7) splitter and take the power from
something else with e.g. a 4 pin molex connector and the data from the 7
pin SATA