Hi all,

I've got a WGT634U unit running OpenWRT 8.09 and are having issues getting my external USB harddisks (two SATA disks in "Powerfreakz ripple" SATA-to-USB enclosures) to work. I've tried connecting them to a Linux machine and an Apple MacBook and they work fine on those (so the hardware isn't broken).
However, when connecting them either directly (well, one at a time as it only has one USB port) or through a USB hub they only blink their activity LED whilst I can hear them trying to spin up and then giving up in cycles of maybe half a second. logread and dmesg doesn't show any notice at all about anything connecting on the USB port. Connecting a USB memory stick works fine, it gets detected and gets mounted with no problems.

Thinking that it might be a power issue I got a powered USB hub, but it doesn't seem to have changed anything. The USB memory stick works fine in the hub, but the disks still do their attempts to spin up. I tried removing the ehci_hcd module, in case it was some issue with the high-speed mode, but that didn't help either.

Any ideas of how to move forward from here? Could it be that the powered USB hub also doesn't deliver enough power? When the disks are connected to my Linux machine lsusb shows them asking for 2mA of power which I have a vague memory of is the maximum they are allowed to ask for.

I don't know how to measure it, and I'm sure there are more experienced hands about than I, but I'm going to bet that you got a cheap powered hub, and that it doesn't deliver enough voltage to drive the platter motor on your drive.

Yeah, I was afraid of that, but it seems like even if you are building a cheap hub, as you are getting the voltage from the mains it would be _more_ problems driving the voltage below required levels than not to. I'd imagined the quality difference would be in getting the power stable or something.
I'll see what I can dig up on the power end of things, but except that any other places where things might go wrong where I should be looking?

yep, problem here is lack of power.

uhm,
I wished I read this thread before buying a WD my passport elite drive for my WGT634U
it seems as if the drive is power-starving, click, click, clicky
anyways to power-mod the router usb port?

Have a look here. Be careful. Do this under your own and I take no responsibility if you damage your device.

mazilo,
thanks, I've run across that thread
the thing is my hands and eye sight are not what they're used to be
anyways, I'll take a look see this weekend
anyone here has any success in using a powered hub with the WGT634U?

(Last edited by routerWhacker on 2 Dec 2009, 01:09)