Dear Tonido,

At this point I'm very disappointed with the TonidoPlug and would not recommend it, at least not for the purposes I purchased it.

I purchased mine last year to use as a platform for Squeezebox Server, which some very clever and generous techies have adapted to run on it. I installed the requisite software on a USB stick and the TonidoPlug booted from the stick and ran it just fine for almost 5 months whereupon the stick failed and would no longer boot. So much for flash with its limited lifespan.

Having read that the TonidoPlug was designed to boot from either a USB flash drive or a USB hard drive I purchased a USB hard drive, an Eagle Consus ET-CS2MSU2. After several unsuccessful attempts to make this HDD bootable I went back to the TonidoPlug Web site for further help. The official TonidoPlug documentation was useless, but I found posts in the TonidoPlug Support blog indicating that quite a few other TonidoPlug users have had similar problems, and that the TonidoPlug has been documented to boot successfully from only 3 or 4 USB HDD models.

That last piece of information is not found in Tonido's official documentation nor in the Tonido blog, but in a separate Web site apparently maintained by TonidoPlug users: http://www.tonidouser.com/doku.php?id=g ... dusbdrives, which is linked in one of the messages in the Tonido support blog. The only relevant info I found in Tonido's Web site (other than the blog posts mentioned) is this from the official documentation: "Not all USB disks or sticks are compatible for booting the plug. If your plug is not booting with the USB disk you've used then please repeat the procedure with a different USB disk." No problem, we'll just keep buying USB drives until we find one that works, right?

So it isn't TonidoPlug incompatibility that I find so irksome, but Tonido's sandbagging. Come on Tonido! Start testing USB flash and HDDs and publishing the results, or at least take more of an interest in promoting, soliciting and publishing testing results from your customers. Otherwise, you should put a big disclaimer up front in your sales as well as technical documentation warning of the possibility if not likelihood of external drive boot compatibility issues.

Thanks for listening and, hopefully, prompt remedial action.

Regards,

jmang

Eagle Consus ET-CS2MSU2 is an enclosure what's the HDD

I should add that a careful reading of the information posted on the Tonido user Web site indicates that the TonidoPlug is bootable from an external USB HDD only in theory. In practice it appears that none of the HDDs reported as successfully booting the TonidoPlug are reported to ever spin down. This is problematic because it means the hard drive's lifetime will be shortened, energy will be wasted and the TonidoPlug itself may not last as long as it should due to the electrical demands of an always-spinning HDD.

As for my Squeezebox Server application, I'm seriously considering junking the TonidoPlug and going back to using my Mac Mini to host it. That platform has the disadvantage of delayed response when the Squeezebox device attempts to connect to Sqeezebox Server for the first time in a while and "wakes up" the Mac, but at least the server app will last longer than a few months on the Mac, which also has a pretty efficient energy-saving sleep mode. Reinstalling Squeezebox Server requires rebuilding its music library which in my case requires going through almost 50GB of music files and takes several hours on the TonidoPlug, not something I want to go through if the next USB stick I use with TonidoPlug only lasts a few months, not to mention the cost of replacing it yet again.

Flash should have lasted longer than 5 months. That sounds like defective hardware.

Flash can read a very long time. It is writing that wears it out. 50GB of music that you are accessing for listening shouldn't wear it out that fast. That is why flash is very good for MP3. Write once read many.

Squeezebox and booting externally isn't offically supported by Tonido. The booting externally was made easier by Tonido because people specifically requested it so they could to hack around on the plug without voiding their warranty, but Tonido is officially selling their Tonido software with the plug which does not require booting off an external media. That is what sets them apart from just going out and buying your own Sheeva Plug..

With that said, you can do these other unsupported things, but your mileage may very. That is always the case when you are re-purposing something for a different purpose than the product was originally intended for.

HDD is Hitachi HTS541612J9SA00 rated at 120GB, actual max partition size reported by gparted live is 111.79GB.

But does that really matter? The enclosure is acting as a SATA->USB adapter translating between the USB and SATA protocols. If anything is affecting the boot ability of the device wouldn't it be much more likely to be the logic built into the enclosure?

I would like to believe that, and that another hopefully non-defective stick would last much longer. But on the other hand there's a whole operating system running from that stick perhaps with one or more daemons updating logs and other things automatically that eventually surpass the flash's write limit in a rather brief time. As you point out flash was not designed to be repeatedly written.

Yeah, a USB flash stick is probably made at a lower standard than maybe an Solid State USB drive. Both flash, but quality is probably better on an SSD drive due to its requirements to run an OS instead of just house files. I have a netbook with a SSD drive than runs the OS, and it has ran it fine for quite a while now; but, yes, it will die more than likely well before a traditional drive.

I am sorry that you are having trouble with booting the plug off the HDD. Although, we support it, it is not officially part of the product, the core product being an extensible NAS/Home Server run by Tonido software. We never market the booting off an external HDD as a feature.

Currently, due to the huge number of HDDs available in the market, it is simply infeasible to test them all. We go by what the community reports (for example via the wiki).

Different drives have different features. A drive that spins down on idle time, will still spin down regardless of the adapter, unless the firmware purposely acts different when connected via a different protocol etc. Every hard drive is different. HDD drives given to Dell and Apple may be slightly different even though they both get them form WD or Seagate. Different vendors demand different features. It all depends on the drive's firmware, not necessarily the adapter.

Accessing a drive for storage is different than the demands of an OS at boot time etc. so not every drive will work for booting externally. I think one of the big things is spin up time. The plug only waits so long for a drive to respond back; a drive with long spin up time will not respond in time at boot time. This could be fixed by changing the plugs firmware, but again this was not the original intent for the plug.

I'm familiar with this issue. My USB flash stick that failed was too slow for a cold boot. If there was a power failure the TonidoPlug would always boot from internal NAND. I had to warm boot the Plug to get it to boot from the USB stick.

With this HDD the symptoms are different. Regardless of cold or warm boot the HDD activity LED flashes twice and then nothing happens for about 5 minutes. Nothing meaning that the Plug does not boot during that time. I know this because it does not respond to SSH login or a call to its Web page.

If the Plug were timing out on the HDD it would have booted almost immediately from NAND. That isn't happening. I think that the Plug is actually going into some sort of wait loop. It would appear the HDD is responding fast enough, but in a way that delays and finally disrupts the boot process and only then does the Plug boot from NAND.