USB issues.

Leigh · *nix forums beginner Joined: 28 Sep 2005 Posts: 27

I have an old Dell machine running SUSE 10 which basically does backups
of two XP machines (well copies actually).

The copies are done to an external USB disk called DISK1. For
safety/paranoia after it is done DISK1 is then copied to DISK2. DISK1
is served by Samba and is read/write enabled. DISK2 is also served by
Samba but is set to be read-only. THe USB card is a 4 port Belkin card
and the two external caddies are Safecom ones.

Originally this config had a 120GB Seagate disk in each caddy and it
was pretty quick especially the DISK1 to DISK2 copy which typicallty
did about 1GB every 2 minutes.

Both the 120GB disks broke over the last couple of months and now it's
a Maxtor 160GB disk (2mb) cache and a Hitachi Deskstar 160GB (8mb
cache). When the second disk was repopulated on the first run the DISK1
to DISK2 copy took nearly 26 hours which is down to 2GB per hour.

No apparent problems in dmesg but when I did an fsck of the Hitachi
disk I got this

"(/dev/sdb1) has been mounted 320 times without being checked, check
forced"

Now I know I didn't mount the disk 320 times so why did it? When I
access either disk via Samba they're both pretty quick and don't
generate errors. Is it the difference in size of the cache's?

aryzhov@spasu.net · *nix forums addict Joined: 17 Feb 2005 Posts: 64

Have you run "mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb1" (and the same for another disk),
or the partitions still contain off-the-shelf Windoze compatible
universal filesystem? No idea what it's called, but it's RRREALLY slow
comparing to ext3. Downside is, you won't be able to swap the disk
between Windoze and Linux, but if you stick to Samba exports only,
it shouldn't matter.

Regards,
Andrei

Leigh · *nix forums beginner Joined: 28 Sep 2005 Posts: 27

Actually did mkfs.ext3 -L DISK1 /dev/sdb1 and sda1 for the two disks.

I've always used ext3 for external USB disks because there's a pretty
good windows driver for ext3 disks at www.fs-driver.org which allows
Windows to read ext3 disks directly. I've used it for a year or so and
it's never given problems.

The original 120GB disks were also ext3 and the copy between them flew
so I'm at a loss as to why the two 160GB disks slowed to a crawl. The
two 120GB disks were identical but these 160's aren't which is why I
wondered.

At this moment I'm inclined to think that the caddy might have a fault
but I can't really prove it.

aryzhov@spasu.net wrote:

Joost van der Waa · *nix forums addict Joined: 20 Mar 2005 Posts: 80

Leigh wrote:

Leigh · *nix forums beginner Joined: 28 Sep 2005 Posts: 27

Well the caddies appear, so far, to be ok with the Maxtor and Hitachi.
But the two 120GB disks appear to be OK in a none Safecom caddie as
well.

Joost van der Waa wrote:

Google