I had done something similar as an upgrade back around November. I bought two 500GB external disks and ran md RAID-1 plus LVM on top (I thought I'd ordered eSATA/USB drives, but no, they're external USB with SATA.. Oh fun). This disk space has been used for MythTV storage and my music collection. Anyway, I started experiencing a bunch of bus resets and RAID failures after about a month. I eventually decided that one of my drives was apparently just bad (well, it also showed SCSI read errors in addition to the bus resets -- maybe it's just the USB-SATA bridge). I was pretty disgruntled by that, though I've been too lazy to get a replacement disk (I was curious about the internals, and it just happened to be the disk I'd voided the warranty on by opening it). The other 500GB drive's been running just fine, though I do see some periodic bus resets. Yeah, things just tend to pause for 10 seconds or so and then get going again. The md and LVM subsystems don't seem to complain though. Of course, I was also very glad I'd gone with the RAID idea (though I have to kick things manually whenever I boot up -- I doubt many people have tried this particular arrangement). I would have hated to go through and rip my CDs yet *again*. The whole sequence of events has made me suspect that external USB drive manufacturers only intend for the devices to be powered up periodically for backups. Or, maybe either the Linux USB subsystem, or USB itself, is not able to reliably work with the data loads put on it by DVR software and other stuff that exercises the disk a lot. -- Mike Hicks <hick0088 at tc.umn.edu> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20080229/a585e144/attachment.pgp