Re: [PLUG] Weird drive quantum states

[Walt Mankowski <waltman@pobox.com>]

On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 07:50:16PM -0400, jeff wrote:
> On 10/13/2011 05:46 PM, Casey Bralla wrote:
> >USB drives are not as reliable as you might think. I've known people who
> >have had them "crash" and lost everything on them. It may be getting
> >flaky and about to fail.
> >
> 
> these have misbehaved since new.
> One is a recently opened 1.5g ext drive, which actually got eaten
> while connected via esata.
> 
> I'm thinking it's something else but I appreciate the input.
> It's almost like they overheat or get overloaded.  It never happens
> when idle - only in the middle of an xfer.

I have an external 1TB USB drive that's also misbehaved since new.
It's my backup drive, and I've split into a 500 MB ext4 partition and
a 500 MB partition I use for Time Machine for my macbook.  It's been
extremely reliable with OSX, but I've had lots of problems with it on
Linux.  However, most of those issues were when I was running 2.6.32.
I run Debian testing, and as the kernels have cycled through 2.6.38,
2.6.39, and 3.0.0 it's become a lot more reliable.

Maybe the USB and ext4 drivers have gotten better at my particular
issue, or maybe I've just gotten lucky.  Anyway, I suppose it wouldn't
hurt to try a newer kernel if possible and see if that helps your
problem, too.

Walt

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