In message , Andy Burns
writes
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?

Yes. It has now been back to the manufacturer at least 3 times. Once
because it fell off the shelf.

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.

The ad on Amazon UK says "Dispatched from and sold by Amazon US.
Purchase is subject to separate terms and conditions. ". He has also
looked at the conditions for its return. It has to be posted within AIUI
2 days.

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.

It is writing to the internal hard drive on sda1 . I don't think this is
usb in any form.

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.

The drive seems to be detected as sr0, It seems to throw out some data
about itself. On 2 tries, one said 24x, the other 48x. This is all done
via Teamviewer and PuTTY, and he has to balance the various items on his
knee, so not ideal. The caddy opens and closes as expected, but the
drive doesn't spin up

The same thing happens if he plugs it into his PC. The drive is seen but
no music ever plays. I think it has failed. He still hasn't found the
cleaning disk, but points out that the drive never spins up, so that
can't work.

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
I think that is beyond what he and I want to do.

We both really want to find a basic non-usb powered drive.
This drive was ripping CD's in 3 minutes as against 20 to 30 minutes via
the usb powerd drive or the internal CD drive.
--
Bill