Original post is here: eklausmeier.goip.de
Task at hand: Increase SSD storage on Asrock A300M mini-PC, as existing SSD is 90% full.
Solution: Buy a new 2 TB SSD, or use an existing 2 TB SSD, for example a Samsung.
Bad idea: Buy a new 4 TB SSD from Crucial and insert it into the A300M.
1. Problem statement. Since May 2020 I own an Asrock A300M mini PC with a Ryzen 3400G CPU. It's a nice and reliable computer, which is used for hosting this blog. There were two problems with the disk:
- I had a major pacman-upgrade issue, with hundreds of zero-sized packages left on disk.
- The 2 TB Viper disk was too small, disk was more than 90% full.
I searched for SSD's and found a Crucial 4 TB SSD, which was advertised to work within the A300M-STX. This was quite remarkable as the the Asrock website for the A300M offers no 4 TB SSD. See Storage QVL. Below is the screenshot of the obviously false claim that the Crucial 4 TB SSD works in the A300M.
So I ordered this 4 TB Crucial SSD for 182 EUR. For comparison, here are the SSD prices for my older SSD.
| Date | Model | Price in EUR |
|---|---|---|
| 26-Jul-2023 | 4TB Crucial P3 SSD M.2 2280 PCIe 3.0 x4 3D-NAND QLC | 182.24 |
| 25-Apr-2022 | 2TB Samsung PM9A1 M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 3D-NAND TLC | 256.92 |
| 25-May-2020 | 2TB 3.0/3.1G Viper VPN100 M.2 PAT | 329.00 |
One can clearly see that prices for SSDs have gone down significantly.
2. Problems with the Crucial SSD.
The new Crucial 4TB SSD:
Opening the Asrock A300M after 3 years of uninterrupted service. The fan has accumulated quite some dust.
Mounting the Crucial 4TB SSD in the A300M:
The "old" 2TB SSD from Viper.
The new 4 TB Crucial SSD makes the A300M completely unresponsive, i.e., the A300M does not boot at all.
I tried a number of countermeasures:
- Update BIOS in A300M: from p3.50 to p3.70 to p.370b
- Mount Crucial on different M.2 interface
- I contacted the German customer support
All to no avail.
I checked, whether the Crucial SSD is working properly by putting it into my work PC: It worked flawlessly. So, the aformentioned advertisement is wrong. The Crucial does not work in the Asrock A300M.
Crucial customer support, part of Micron Commercial Products Group, obiously does not understand the problem and responds with generic text fragments.
3. Remedy. I put the new Crucial 4 TB into my work PC. From the work PC I used the "old" Samsung 2 TB:
After so many tries with negative results I am testing the A300M without case for some time:
Reassembling.
After intensive testing the A300M has now two SSD and also 4 TB of SSD storage.
Output of lsblk -f is as below:
1NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
2nvme0n1
3├─nvme0n1p1 vfat FAT32 A743-0700
4└─nvme0n1p2 crypto_LUKS 2 70260d27-bc13-44dd-9b30-168c2be7c72f
5 └─viper ext4 1.0 dac919c6-2f0f-466b-ada8-692ce6d16d91 983.9G 42% /mnt/viper
6nvme1n1
7├─nvme1n1p1 vfat FAT32 BOOT_FAT32 EB01-74DD 116.1M 54% /boot
8└─nvme1n1p2 crypto_LUKS 2 9b0766ca-06ce-41d6-9b46-04c66573f3aa
9 └─Samsung2TB ext4 1.0 63669b64-5753-44a6-8626-561a6c98ab5b 466.6G 70% /