I use my Raspberry mainly as a fileserver. I've attached 3 harddrives, 1 of them being an SDD and 2 Mechanical 3.5 Drives. When powered on, everything seems to work. However, when booting, the initial boot of both the mechanical drives draws too much energy, so the Pi crashes and is stuck in a loop.
This makes rebooting dangerous since I cannot trust the PI to be reliable with those HDDs attached. What can I do?
I'm assuming these are USB drives, and are powered from the Pi USB port(s).
You're probably exceeding the power supply capacity of the Pi and/or the power supply. Hard drives require a fair amount of current to operate- even more on startup.
The only way you're going to get this to work is to use a powered USB hub. Make sure the hub has its own power supply and can supply enough current to make all three drives happy (check the drive specs and add up the required currents). Plug the hub into the wall. Plug the hub into the PI, plug the drives into the hub.
