On Mon, 21 Jan 2008, Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote: > Hi > > My external USB disk has never been 100% reliable, but since recently it > seems to be causing USB resets more often than before. Therefore a couple > questions: > > 1. Is it dying? should I look for a replacement?
Maybe. It depends on what is causing the resets. > 2. Before, if such a reset happened when the disk was mounted it > definitely meant SCSI errors, most probably, a disconnect. Now (2.6.22 > Debian kernel) these resets seem to be handled transparently - no SCSI or > fs errors, just a delay in data transfer and then it just continues. Is it > indeed a (relatively) new feature? New since about 2.6.10. :-) > How normal is it? On a well-working system it isn't normal at all. Resets like that are a sign of something wrong. It could be at the electrical level (cable connections or power levels), firmware level, media level (read/write errors), or possibly elsewhere. > And how reliable is > the recovery? Well, I presume it should be reliable since there are no > SCSI / fs errors, but... For certain classes of errors it is quite reliable. For others it doesn't help at all. For example, if the drive's firmware has crashed then a reset isn't likely to help. > In short - shall I worry or shall I not?:-) Since the errors have been increasing in frequency, you probably should worry. Alan Stern - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-usb" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
