How to connect an external HDD to OSMC on RPi

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

Hello,
I have a little problem. I can’t find my HDD pluged in my RPi whereas I can my find another HDD plug in my residential gateway (so OSMC accesses it through network).

When I use putty to find it, it doesn’t appear:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs        172M     0  172M   0% /dev
tmpfs           177M  2.6M  174M   2% /run
/dev/mmcblk0p2   15G  1.7G   12G  13% /
tmpfs           177M     0  177M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs           177M     0  177M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1  240M   32M  208M  14% /boot
tmpfs            36M     0   36M   0% /run/user/1000

Moreover, each time I plug it in, OSMC reboots.

What I have to do to add my HDD?

Thanks in advance,
Dark Patate

2

Is the drive powered via USB, or self powered. I’m betting it’s USB powered and that your Pis power supply isn’t sufficient. Try a better power supply.

3

Yeah the HDD is powered by the USB. There is no way to connect it to the Pi ?

4

Yes, get a proper power supply for the Pi.

5

The official pi 2.5a power supply can power my WD my passport 2tb fine

6

But the Pi itself is powered with a power supply (a smartphone power supply).

7

That is not a power supply, that is a phone charger.

Your power supply probably isn’t up to scratch. You can learn more on our Wiki here: Frequently Asked Questions - Raspberry Pi - OSMC

1 Like
8

It’s the charger I got from RS with the RPi. But I just checked it, and it’s only a 1.5 A charger.
So, ok, I need to find a 2A charger.

Thanks!

9

you can also try to use a active USB Hub. Then the HDD will be powered via the power supply of the USB HUB.

10

Hi,

Ideally you want to a 2.5A power supply for the pi:

Thanks Tom.

11

Might not be true for all, but when I tried an USB powered disk I still had to add ‘max_usb_current=1’ to config.txt even though I used a powered hub.
I guess the disk politely asked the Pi for power instead of the hub?

Regards
/L

12

In order to check my charger specifications, I had to unpluged the Pi. After restarting it, the HDD was detected!

But I will still find a better power supply :slight_smile: