I have an external drive that connects to a Suse 10.2 box via a usb connector. When I boot the system, it finds and mounts the drive using /dev/sdc1. To troubleshoot, I've created an entry in /etc/fstab to manually mount and umount. When mounted, it looks as a normal drive (ntfs) and appears on the surface to work properly. When I try to transfer a large file (500MB or so) from the external drive to an internal drive it starts out transferring around 30MB/s (Mbytes/sec) and rapidly trails off to around 3MB/s. About 75% through the transfer, the transfer "stalls". Eventually, the drive is unaccessible and the entry in /dev disappears. The drive is still mounted but you can't access the data. If I umount the drive and try to re-mount, it says device /dev/sdc1 does not exist. I have to reboot in order for the system to see the device again. I've tried the normal things like manually mounting async vs sync, checked the kernel for scsi and usb drive support and usb mass storage support....all seems well. My system is a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz with 1 G RAM. The motherboard is an ABit VT7 with two SATA ports. I have an 250 G IDE drive which has /, /boot, swap, and /home. The SATA drives are two 400 G drives configured in a RAID 1 configuration using Linux software RAID (MD). That appears to work just fine. I'm stumped and frustrated.....thanks in advance!
j.