Hello,
Question for ZWO Techs or end-users having same issues: in case my ASIAir Plus eMMC drive fails completely and the OS cannot be recovered, do you have imaged, bootable eMMC drives available that you could ship to me and I can just snap-in after removing the old failed drive?
I'm becoming suspicious of the eMMC drive in my Plus unit. Last night while imaging with the ASIAir Plus in Autorun mode, the file "Loading" process off the ASI071MC-Pro camera to eMMC after each image is finished suddenly dropped down in speed from 1.5mb/sec to 40-50KB/sec and stayed there for 2 hours. It was taking at least 5-7 minutes just to transfer one image from the camera to the eMMC folder after each exposure which slowed down the whole AutoRun process to a crawl and took forever. Switching over to offload each image from camera to USB stick instead of eMMC on the ASIAir unit did not help the slow-down.
While in the middle of transferring one of these camera shots to eMMC, the ASIAir suddenly rebooted itself and the slowdown mysteriously disappeared the rest of the night once the ASIAIR and ASI071 camera re-initialized (even though I had already power-cycled all equipment previously with no resolution of the problem earlier).
During this severe data throughput slowdown, it didn't matter if I used the USB Stick to save files from the camera or the eMMC. Throughput was the same on each: about 40-50kb/sec, way down from the usual 1.5mb/second.
So this mysterious error might recur again I suppose, and I am not able to figure out why it happened in the first place.
Possible causes?........
External ower supply issues to the ASIAIR not likely...I have stable 12.1V/20 amps going into the ASIAir from a surge-protected and battery backup provisioned power supply for ripple-free input power to the ASIAIR Plus, ASI071 and ASI174 MINI (cabled directly to one of the two ASI071's USB 2.0 port)
Overheating of the ASIAir unit slowing down its processing speed? It was reading 37.1 deg. Celsius the whole time which is about normal for this unit in my usual outdoor environment. ASIAir's internal fan can be heard audibly and has not failed.
Overheating of the ASI071 camera? TEC was enabled on the camera @ -5 deg C. Camera TEC was running at a stable 40-45% capacity all night on about 65-70 degree F outdoor temps. Anti-Dew on the ASI071 was NOT used any at all.
Camera issues with the ASI071MC-Pro? Power-off and rebooting everything on the power input side to all ASI equipment and re-plugging all USB ports and power cables didn't help when the slowdown was occuring. It was not network related because even copying over saved files from eMMC to USB stick directly on the ASIAir unit itself was also very much slower than usual. This would indicate to me the problem was likely to be internal in the ASIAir unit itself.
Random data corruption on eMMC drive that auto-fixed itself? Unknown. Since I can't mount the eMMC to run diagnostics on it, no way to see if the problem was data corruption that eventually resolved itself (rebooting ASIAir and cameras didn't help then either).
Has anyone else seen these random, unexplained severe data transfer slowdowns from camera to eMMC or USB on the ASIAIr units? Since I can't solve it, that means it could happen again and ruin another night of imaging.
ZWO Techs, any suggestions? Are there any diagnostic tests I can run on the ASIAir unit or camera to see if I can isolate where the slowdown is coming from if it happens again and power-cycling everything doesn't help?
Thanks,
Wade Van Arsdale
Registered ASIAIR Plus, Pro, and ASI cameras owner
Little Rock, AR., US
