DeskPi Pro bad SATA controller?

Hi Robert, thanks for your reply…

I did all that–I was the Technical Editor on Derek’s “Exploring Raspberry Pi” book, after you and Jason worked on his BBB book. As I mentioned in my first post, the OS was downloaded from the Raspberry Pi site last week (ie; it’s the latest version available), and my bootloader is the latest version as well–and the same as you showed:

pi@rpi4-4gb:~ $ vcgencmd bootloader_version
Mar 18 2021 08:54:11
version 1b43d5b6fe5b71c300563afc0548122752a0618b (release)
timestamp 1616057651
update-time 1617415102

That said, I do not believe this is an issue with the RPi4 itself, its OS, or the bootloader. All the forum posts I find referencing this issue, appear to point to the JMicron USB-to-SATA controller as the issue. I was just wondering whether or not someone has ordered a DeskPi Pro case from DigiKey lately (in the past month or so) and NOT had issues with USB boot?

My suspicion is that:

  1. This case is one of their first batches, with the (known-to-be) problematic JMicron controller;
  2. The company (52Pi) hasn’t been replacing the SSD board (and by extension, the SATA controller) like they said;
  3. I’ll not hear anything back from them on this.

Thanks again for your reply. I find it disappointing that I can’t seem to get any response from the manufacturer, and in fact that they seem to have stopped responding to everyone at all on this issue (as evidenced by several reports in the forums).

Tom