Seagate GoFlex Hanging

[SanityChallenged]

I got a new 2 TB Seagate GoFlex Desk drive recently. It has the USB 3.0 adapter installed.

I have it attached to a USB 2.0 port on a system running openSuse 11.2.
I reformatted it from NTFS to ext3. mkfs and fsck -c checked for bad blocks and all seemed ok.

It seems that the drive will stop responding after a few hours of not being used. I am getting commit journal I/O errors occasionally,also.

It is currently attached to my 'desktop' machine. I want to use this drive to store a collection of music and video and attach it to my file server (also running openSuse 11.2 on an older athlon machine) for use through out the house on a mix of linux and M$ machines.

I tried running a simple cron job every 10 minutes:
touch /home/flexdrv/touchme

to keep some activity on the drive and keep it from going to sleep.


The cron job seems to get hung after a period of time, and the only way to recover seems to be to reboot at least the external drive, sometimes I have to reboot the entire machine.

Is there a way to ensure this drive will be available on the server when called?

Will I be better off to remove the drive from the external case and mount it internally?

[SanityChallenged]

I tried reformatting the drive to ext4. It seemed to format ok.

I'm also seeing these type messages when running dmesg:

Feb 28 15:43:13 sisu kernel: [450105.407270] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdg] Sense Key : Recovered Error [current] [descriptor]
Feb 28 15:43:13 sisu kernel: [450105.407294] Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex):
Feb 28 15:43:13 sisu kernel: [450105.407305]         72 01 04 1d 00 00 00 0e 09 0c 00 00 00 00 00 4e
Feb 28 15:43:13 sisu kernel: [450105.407331]         00 21 00 00 40 50
Feb 28 15:43:13 sisu kernel: [450105.407348] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdg] ASC=0x4 ASCQ=0x1d
Feb 28 15:43:13 sisu kernel: [450105.423522] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdg] Sense Key : Recovered Error [current] [descriptor]
Feb 28 15:43:13 sisu kernel: [450105.423543] Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex):
Feb 28 15:43:13 sisu kernel: [450105.423554]         72 01 04 1d 00 00 00 0e 09 0c 00 00 00 00 00 4e
Feb 28 15:43:13 sisu kernel: [450105.423581]         00 21 00 00 40 50
Feb 28 15:43:13 sisu kernel: [450105.423598] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdg] ASC=0x4 ASCQ=0x1d
Feb 28 15:43:13 sisu kernel: [450105.424778] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdg] Sense Key : Recovered Error [current] [descriptor]
Feb 28 15:43:13 sisu kernel: [450105.424796] Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex):
Feb 28 15:43:13 sisu kernel: [450105.424807]         72 01 00 1d 00 00 00 0e 09 0c 00 00 00 ff 00 00
Feb 28 15:43:13 sisu kernel: [450105.424834]         00 00 00 00 40 50

I think this may be a problem with using a USB 3 adapter on a USB 2 jack.

A quick google search of

ASC=0x4 ASCQ=01xd

is showing similar issues with other distributions (at least Fedora) and similar ( USB 3 ) drives. It appears to be a bug in the kernel up through at least version 2.6.35

To summarize:
I believe this is NOT a problem with the drive. It appears to be a compatability issue between a USB 3.0 device and a USB 2.0 port.

Has anyone else seen this problem? Do newer versions of the kernel correct it?

[bluehorizon]

Hi,
it seems that Seagate GoFlex series have several problems with linux. Refer to Seagate community's forum... (i still cannot post urls, but... forums.seagate.com/t5/GoFlex-GoFlex-Desk-GoFlex-Pro/Just-bought-the-new-3TB-GoFlex-Desk-how-do-I-properly-format-and/td-p/56385).
I've got the same problem, for days i tried to use the GoFlex as an external OS hdd with no success.