[olug] problems with external USB device

[Daniel Linder]

On Wed, January 31, 2007 12:13, Sam Tetherow wrote:
> Slightly offtopic:
> Does anyone else have problems in general with external USB enclosures
> on linux? I've had 3 different enclosures and all 3 will corrupt the
> drive if I leave them plugged in for any real lenght of time (more than
> a day, sometimes much sooner). It will throw general IO errors when
> trying to read or write and occasionally it will corrupt the file system
> on the drive (both reiserfs and ext3). In one case it was trashed beyond
> fsck's ability to repair.

My CompUSA "MetalGear Solid" external USB/FireWire enclosure works just
good enough to keep from getting recycled.  I purchased it to be an
external backup device for both my laptop (Linux) and my wifes desktop
computer (WinXP).  Both using different USB chips, and both are marked as
"USB 2.0 compliant", but on either machine if I try to transfer a lot of
data (i.e. >10GB) all at once (either "cp -r" or drag-n-drop from
Explorer), it will start failing.  (Windows would fail silently and just
act goofy until I rebooted, at least Linux had a 50/50 chance of
correcting itself once I rmmod'ed the usb drivers)

I just chalked it up to my fault: I purchased the least expensive USB and
FireWire enclosure I could find in town.  You get what you pay for I
guess.

I've heard that some of the Mac-oriented firewire enclosures (with USB
also) are a bit more bullet-proof but I can't verify.

Dan

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