I have installed lubuntu to my Cubieboard2 and I have also connected a 2.5” SATA HDD. I wanted to know if my power supply is providing enough power so I tried to measure current output from 5V power supply.
I used cheap small USB power meter (find also some on eBay for less then 5€).
My results varies according to HDD usage:
- HDD not attached 0.25 – 0.4A
- HDD not spinning 0.46A
- HDD not utilized 0.65A
- HDD utilized 0.9 – 1.14A
Each measurement is depicted in next chapters. You can see that no other device is connected to cubieboard nor SD card.
Cubieboard2 without SATA
HDD is not attached and no running jobs were processed in cubieboard so the current was ~0,3A si aksi 500mA 5V power supply should be enough to power cubieboard2 without HDD and load.
Cubieboard2 with SATA drive not spinning
With attached HDD but with configuration that enabled spinnig down the HDD (by command sudo hdparm -S 25 /dev/sda), The power consumption increased and measured current was ~0.5A.
sudo hdparm -C /dev/sda /dev/sda: drive state is: standby
Cubieboard2 with SATA drive spinning but not accessed
While the drive was spinning the measured current increased to ~0.7A when the drive was not accessed by any process.
sudo hdparm -C /dev/sda /dev/sda: drive state is: active/idle
Cubieboard2 with SATA drive copying file
Finally I started to copy large file and the measured current increased to ~1.1A. Still much bellow my power supply that has maximum current of 2.1A.
The load was generated by SCP and CPU utilization was 100% according to htop:
That’s all.. If you have some other measurements please leave a comment.
If you want to use your 2.5” HDD with cubieboard2 this guide will help you.