External USB enclosure issues.

[Gregory Gulik]

I've been having USB 2.0 enclosure issues lately and I recently replaced 
my motherboard hoping that will resolve them only to have made them worse.

Back in the old days my old motherboard had USB 1.1 ports built in.  It 
was slow but it was pretty much rock solid with Fedora.  I bought a 
USB2.0/1394 combo card and USB 2.0 was much faster but it was flaky now 
and then.

I recently upgraded my motherboard to an ASUS A7V8X-X with USB 2.0 
built-in and now the external enclosure is nearly unuseable with either 
the on-board ports or the card.

I use a couple drives 160G/200G and now 250G for network backups in the 
external enclosure.  This lets me hot swap the drive easily.  Since 
upgrading my motherboard any time I need to do heavy I/O to the drive I 
get errors such as this:

Jan  9 12:28:23 penguin kernel: SCSI disk error : host 2 channel 0 id 0 
lun 0 return code = 70000
Jan  9 12:28:23 penguin kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:32, sector 3463264
Jan  9 12:28:23 penguin kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:32, sector 3463272
Jan  9 12:28:23 penguin kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:32, sector 3463504
Jan  9 12:28:23 penguin kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:32, sector 88769984
Jan  9 12:28:23 penguin kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:32, sector 88810992
Jan  9 12:28:23 penguin kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:32, sector 88820264
Jan  9 12:28:23 penguin kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:32, sector 88820504
Jan  9 12:28:23 penguin kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:32, sector 88820744
Jan  9 12:28:23 penguin kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:32, sector 88820984
Jan  9 12:28:23 penguin kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:32, sector 6056
Jan  9 12:28:23 penguin kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:32, sector 6104

Once that happens the USB device is pretty hosed and only a reboot fixes 
USB on the system.

However I take the drive out of the enclosure and put it directly on the 
IDE bus and it works perfectly!!!

Furthermore, if I put the drive back in the enclosure and attach it to 
my Dell 8100 laptop (also running Fedora) with USB 1.1 ports and it 
works flawlessly there too.

Is this motherboard just cursed???

Here are some particulars of the problem system:
[root at penguin root]# lspci | more
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8377 [KT400 AGP] Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8235 PCI Bridge
00:0c.0 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
00:0c.1 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
00:0c.2 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
00:0c.3 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 2.0 Controller (rev 01)
00:0c.4 FireWire (IEEE 1394): ALi Corporation M5253 P1394 OHCI 1.1 
Controller
00:0d.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video 
Capture (rev 11)
00:0d.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture 
(rev 11)
00:0f.0 Communication controller: Lucent Microelectronics: Unknown 
device 048c (rev 02)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 80)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 80)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 80)
00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 82)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8235 ISA Bridge
00:11.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. 
VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT8233/A/C/VT8235 PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. 
VT8233/A/8235 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 50)
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] 
(rev 74)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage 128 Pro 
Ultra TF

The enclosure is an ADS USB2.0/1394 enclosure which uses the Oxford 
OXFW911 bridge, which came higly recommended by other Linux-heads.

It worked pretty well under RH9, slightly better on Fedora with the old 
motherboard and USB 1.1 with an occasional lockup, but very infrequent.

-- 
Greg Gulik                                 http://www.gulik.org/greg/
greg @ gulik.org