When booting from the card, what most frequently triggers the disconnect is journal writes on suspend and startup. I’ll get a “journal aborted” message on the screen among other related errors.
I’ve also noticed that when I get such an issue, the longer I wait to restart after a force power off, the longer the interval before another disconnect. This leads me to believe it may be heat related, and I will be following the 1TB guide to install a thermal pad to see if it improves performance.
Yeah, which is a shame… As this thread shows a deal of the purchases of the external drives were for things like dual boot. it was certainly my purpose with it. I was hopeful when the team reported that they were trying to reproduce that they’d find something; getting less so as time goes on. Guess it’s time to just treat it as a fast/large USB thumbdrive.
Adding my two cents – I came here because I just got a 1TB expansion card, intending to use it for dual-boot to separate some work from personal stuff, and sure enough, I’m seeing the problem others are reporting.
11 Gen, Core i7, Manjaro; other cards including two USB-C and one USB-A.
It’s happening pretty often, which makes the card basically useless for its intended purpose (and really, if it’s going to disconnect randomly, I’m not sure it’s useful for ANY purpose).
On the occasion that I use my expansion cards (Windows is running on the one that I use the most), I haven’t had them disconnect, but it has been a long time and I don’t know that I pushed the machine hard when booted from them.
Hopefully if you try it out it greatly reduces the frequency of the disconnects or stops them altogether.
There does not appear to be a heat issue with the card – it’s not particularly warm to the touch. Also, given how long this issue has been going on, if there really was a heat issue with the card, I would honestly expect Framework would have changed the card spec to include the thermal pad, which I gather they haven’t. Keep in mind, this is a brand new expansion module.
Regarding the pad on newer cards, I picked up some additional ones in the August-September time frame, and they did not have the thermal pads, so I added them. My assumption is that newly manufactured cards have them, but that existing inventory does not. It’s relatively simple to add the pad, so I wasn’t bothered. You might check your card. The hardest part is sliding the top of the expansion card off.
That’s a sign that your card may not have the heat transfer pad - the metal case is not acting as a heatsink at all and the ICs overheat. With a heat transfer pad in place, the metal case gets very warm. My 250 GB’s case does get very warm and the transfer speed drops but it does not disconnect.
Yeah, not just ssd for me either. Its rare, but Display port card also occasionally blinks out. But that automaticly fixes itself so it doesn’t really bother me, and I hardly ever use an external display since I don’t have a proper desk. SSD, on the other hand, inspite of reconnecting in milliseconds, does not automaticly remount as linux. Actually gives it a new drive letter since the old one is still in use (mapped and mounted).
When I originally created this thread I still hadn’t experienced it enough outside of ssd to be sure of any other issues, but they are there.
I originally noticed the issue while trying to run an installation image from my card onto my nvme. I went gentoo → arch → ro systemrescuecd b4 giving up and using a usba flash drive. I don’t know if it has any issues with it since I don’t use it much, but ssd expansion card usually failed in seconds to a couple hrs when running an OS on it, so fact I have had no issue means it is much less vulnerable.
I also noticed my wifi often blinks out at the same time as my ssd disconnects, solvable by turning wifi off and back on again with keyboard. I have tried repositioning the wifi connectors to be extra sure they are not interfering with anything but… yeah… I’ve just given up. I imagine 12th gen doesn’t have whatever quality control issues 11th might have had, and that this particular and frustrating issue that is a very, very, very rare one (since anyone with a dock and monitor or gpu would also notice the issue since everything just randomly blinks out for a millisecond every few hrs/days).
Now just to address the original issue and echoing what I suggested in Discord.
So here’s what I would do to see if this is hardware. I’d format it ext4 (which is as stable as it comes), see if the behavior continues in tests).
It may indeed be hardware, but we need to create a completely different environment. You also indicated on Discord that this was tested on two distros - so I would definitely like to see this error happen on ext4 as well. Yes, dmesg indicates differently, but logs are not always correct. So I prefer eliminating an issue with btrfs (which I doubt, but I need to be 100% sure).
So, here’s a bit more data, as I’ve been running with this card as my daily-driver boot drive for a little over a week now, despite the “danger”.
The most likely times for me to see a problem are really early in a days’ use, right after boot. Once it happens, though, after I reboot, I can go the rest of the day, including putting some stress on the machine, and it doesn’t happen again.
If it keeps happening, I’m going to shift my boot drive back to the internal, but right now, it’s not debilitating, merely annoying.
Oh,no question about it, but I have reasons to want to keep this drive separate, from boot all the way through, if possible, and from a speed standpoint, the USB3.2 SSD module is more than fast enough. If it weren’t for this occasional disconnection glitch, I’d have no complaint at all.