External disk enclosures

[Gothnet]

I have an external SATA disk in a USB enclosure.

When attached to one of my NSLU2s, all is well.

When mounted on the sheevaplug  (Ubuntu default install) it seems fine at first, but trying much beyond 'ls' results in the shell not responding and any other shells locking up if you try anything, including 'ls' on the  directory it's mounted in.

Anyone else tried external hard drive enclosures? Notice this?

[KostaP]

What kind of enclosure - bus or mains powered?

[pushbx]

I have a western digital my password 320G external HDD.  It is bus powered by the USB alone and it works just fine.  In fact, my entire filesystem (including the uImage) boots off the external HDD.

Speed is pretty good too.  I clocked it at ~27Mbytes/sec on both read and write.

[kilowatt]

You can check if it is a problem with the power supplied by the SheevaPlug by attaching the disk via a powered USB 2.0 hub.  This way the hub will supply the power to the disk.  If it works better with the hub then the SheevaPlug is having trouble powering your disk.

Mark

[Gothnet]

You can check if it is a problem with the power supplied by the SheevaPlug by attaching the disk via a powered USB 2.0 hub.  This way the hub will supply the power to the disk.  If it works better with the hub then the SheevaPlug is having trouble powering your disk.

Mark

Seems like a sensible check....

Mine's externally powered though, so it shouldn't be that. I have a couple of other enclosures I'll try to see if I get similar behaviour. Otherwise... nobody else has seen this then I take it?

[dg]

I've been noticing rather dubious behaviour with high-bandwidth devices on USB on the SheevaPlug. I have a suspicion that the USB driver is a bit dodgy. Check for kernel messages (look to see if anything's coming out on the serial console when things go wrong), and see if it matches what people are describing in the 'Hardware/USB Hubs' thread here...