pcDuino3 family has a SATA host can be used to hook a SATA drive. In this post, we mount a WDC laptop SATA drive to pcDuino3.

When we use a drive with pcDuino, please pay special attention to the power supply and USB cable. It needs to be able to deliver 2A. Otherwise, the hard drive has difficulty booting up.

We format the WDC drive on another PC as ntfs, name its volume as ‘owncloud’, and has only one partition.

Click ‘Disk Utility’, and we can click ‘Mount Volume’ to mount the drive.

In the following, we will see how to automatically mount drive during pcDuino boot up.

To achieve that, we add a line to the file named /etc/fstab:

As we want the user ‘ubuntu’ to be able to use the mounted drive, we will find out the group id of the user ‘ubuntu’:

The gid is ‘1002’.

Now, we enter the line as below:

Save and power cycle pcDuino. After it booted up, we will see the sata drive is automatically mounted.

The above method yields the mounted drive not rewritable, if we want to make it rewritable, please install ntfs-3g by ‘$sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g’, and then replace the ntfs in fstab by ntfs-3g.