This is long but please bear with me; I am beyond frustrated and after a lot of fruitless searching and attempts, I am asking for help.
Servers
Dell OptiPlex 745 Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS x64
Dell Optiplex GX520 Ubuntu 12.10 x64
Laptops
Dell Latitude D420 Unbuntu 10.04.3 LTS x86
Mac Book Pro 4,1 Mountain Lion 10.8.2
USB HDD
Seagate Expansion Desktop 2TB USB3 ext4
WesternDigital Elements Desktop 2TB USB2 ext3
Samsung Story 1.5TB USB2 ext3
A while ago now I embarked on what I thought was the relatively simple task of configuring a headless Ubuntu server to serve SMB, LAMP, DLNA, with my new Seagate 2TB drive for storage. I'm not as sharp with Linux as I used to be, but his should all be fairly easy all being well. My initial attempt was on the GX520 with the latest Ubuntu 12.10, however I soon ran in to problems when I was accessing the Seagate. The logs were constantly spitting out the title error message
Code:
sd 4:0:0:0: >timing out command, waited 360s
Google only really turned up some old results for RedHat and Fedora, but there were a couple more recent blogs* about the disk controller having problems with USB drives. The suggestion was to restart usb_storage and the order they're loaded but this proved fruitless. The exact page I cannot now find, but here's some from my history
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/rhel-re...peed-ehci_hcd/
http://mytechnicalthoughts.wordpress...les-in-ubuntu/
The drive will seem to perform fine for a few minutes, but suddenly during access load average will suddenly shoot as high as 40 and I cannot do anything until the 360s timeout. It will then access okay very briefly before cycling again.
Code:
dom@ubplex:/media/seagate/Photos$ ls Canada\ 2010/
ls: reading directory Canada 2010/: Input/output error
$ syslog
Dec 16 20:42:59 ubplex kernel: [ 5761.572056] INFO: task jbd2/sdb1-8:2903 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
$ dmesg
[ 6001.817038] sd 4:0:0:0: >timing out command, waited 360s
## I am putting my full log output on
PASTEBIN there's too much to want to put in a single thread.
Other forum threads suggest the drive may be dying, which is possible but a shame as it's brand new out the plastic. To rule this out I have connected directly to both my laptops and it accesses constantly with zero issues. I have also run smartctl both long and short with zero errors, on both different servers.
Code:
dom@ubplex:/media/seagate/Photos$ sudo smartctl -d sat -l selftest /dev/sdb1
smartctl 5.43 2012-06-30 r3573 [x86_64-linux-3.5.0-17-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-12 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 283 -
# 2 Short offline Completed without error 00% 278 -
When I eventually got fed up, I swapped out the 520+12.10 for the 745+12.04LTS hoping different bridges and controllers might solve the issue but I very quickly experienced the exact same errors.
Next I connected the Seagate to my Latitude D420 and have NOT experienced any issues. This is despite the GX520 and the D420 having chipsets from the same family.
I have also then connected both older drives (WD and Samsung) to the 745 and again have zero issues.
This would therefore suggest the issue is with the Seagate specifically. Is this an issue with Ubuntu and USB ext4 (though it works perfectly on the Latitude)? Is it because it's the only drive that is USB3? I have a 16GB USB3 flash drive that I have accessed on both OptiPlex servers without issue.
My next logical step would be to re-format the Seagate as ext3 and the WD as ext4 and see if there are problems with either in that config? However with copying between disks that takes
days and with the only copies of all this data on those two disks it is an intensive (and fragile) process and so if anybody has any miracle ideas to save me that headache I would be so appreciative!
HELP!?
