Hello I have a very weird problem.
I have tried two different external USB-drives (HP media storage 300gb and Lacie 250gb).
Right now Im trying with the Lacie.

When I have made the filesystem and try to copy anything to the drive for example via winscp. The file transfers for about 1 min and the wscp says "server not answering/timeout".
Small files like <100mb sometimes tranfers without problems. The completed transfered files are not corrupted in any way.

If I try to copy files to it locally it takes about 1 min and stops again, afterwards when i cancel the tranfers it says "unit not ready" or something like that.
I have tried reiserfs, ext3, fat and jfs as filesystems. No difference.
/etc/fstab: /dev/sda1 /home/ftp reiserfs defaults 0 0

I run Kubuntu. Im not to good with this so I would be thankful for good explainations.

Paste from dmesg just after the error:

[4294751.174000] Real Time Clock Driver v1.12
[4294751.240000] FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077
[4294752.657000] eth0: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex, lpa 0x45E1
[4294752.668000] NET: Registered protocol family 17
[4294760.118000] NET: Registered protocol family 10
[4294760.118000] Disabled Privacy Extensions on device c02eb280(lo)
[4294760.118000] IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling driver
[4294760.868000] ACPI: Power Button (FF) [PWRF]
[4294760.868000] ACPI: Power Button (CM) [VBTN]
[4294760.975000] ibm_acpi: ec object not found
[4294761.590000] tun: Universal TUN/TAP device driver, 1.6
[4294761.590000] tun: (C) 1999-2004 Max Krasnyansky <maxk@qualcomm.com>
[4294770.332000] eth0: no IPv6 routers present
[4374004.751000] ReiserFS: sda1: found reiserfs format "3.6" with standard journal
[4374025.693000] ReiserFS: sda1: using ordered data mode
[4374025.723000] ReiserFS: sda1: journal params: device sda1, size 8192, journal first block 18, max trans len 1024, max batch 900, max commit age 30, max trans age 30
[4374025.724000] ReiserFS: sda1: checking transaction log (sda1)
[4374057.705000] ReiserFS: sda1: Using r5 hash to sort names
[4374057.706000] ReiserFS: sda1: warning: Created .reiserfs_priv on sda1 - reserved for xattr storage.

If you leave the file copy running does it start back up again?
I only have USB 1.1 on my laptop so its easily noticable for me but when I copy to a USB drive a bunch of files will list as copied then it will pause and write them then a bunch more will list as copied. It seems to be due to write caching, it will fill up the cach then pause as the writing across the slow USB catches up. I thought there was something wrong at first but then realized what was happening after I quit stopping it and just let it run.