I get the lightning bolt in the corner every time the drive spins up, and vcgencmd get_throttled returns 0x50005. The drive is a 2.5 inch spinning laptop disk in a plastic USB3 enclosure, bus powered, and it is the only thing attached apart from HDMI. Supply is the genuine 15W USB-C one that came with the kit. Does that mean the supply is faulty or is the drive simply too much?
Worth checking the supply cable is the one that came with it. The official Pi 4 supply has a captive cable so that is usually safe, but if you swapped to a random USB-C cable, plenty of them lose 0.3V at 2A, which is exactly the difference between fine and warning.
And measure rather than guess: vcgencmd measure_volts core while the drive spins up, or a cheap inline USB power meter. People spend a lot of time arguing about supplies when a six dollar meter settles it in a minute.
One thing nobody mentions: HDMI plus a drive plus a keyboard is a very different load from the headless setup you probably intend to run. If this ends up as a headless box on a shelf, unplug the monitor and retest before buying anything. Mine only complained during setup and has been clean for a year since.
True, though I would still fix it properly. Spin up current does not go away just because the monitor did, it just fits inside the budget on a good day and not on a warm one.
You can also stop the disk sleeping so it stops spinning up over and over. Try hdparm -B 254 -S 0 on the device and see whether the warnings stop. It burns a couple of watts continuously, but constant spin up cycles are hard on both the drive and your power budget.
@deadbug_wiring · 10mo ago
The drive is too much, and the number confirms it. 0x50005 decodes as under-voltage happening right now, arm frequency capped right now, and both of those having occurred at some point since boot.
A 2.5 inch spinning disk pulls somewhere around 800mA to 1A for the second or two it takes to get the platter up to speed, on top of whatever the Pi is doing. The Pi's USB ports are budgeted for about 1.2A total across all four, and the official supply has no headroom left for a surprise. Options in the order I like them: swap the spinning disk for a 2.5 inch SSD which idles under 300mA, or put the drive on a powered USB3 hub with its own supply, or use a Y cable so the drive draws from a separate charger.
If you leave it as is you will eventually get filesystem damage on the drive, not just a warning icon.
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