USB flash drive and torrent

[karurosu]

Hi,
one of the things I've been using the sheeva plug is to download from torrents, it has been working perfectly 2 days continuously, however, last night at some point m torrents stoped completely. Checking dmesg on the morning I see this:

Code:

end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 63
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 0
lost page write due to I/O error on sda1
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 1
lost page write due to I/O error on sda1
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=0x00 driverbyte=0x08
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Sense Key : 0x7 [current]
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] ASC=0x27 ASCQ=0x0

over and over, with different sectors on the end_request error.
I did a fsck and it repaired a bunch of things:

Code:

fsck 1.41.4 (27-Jan-2009)
e2fsck 1.41.4 (27-Jan-2009)
Files was not cleanly unmounted, check forced.
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Inode 16358, i_blocks is 54688, should be 54880.  Fix<y>? yes

Inode 637732, i_blocks is 631472, should be 631440.  Fix<y>? yes

Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information
Block bitmap differences:  -(55889--55892) -(1954794--1954797)
Fix<y>? yes

Free blocks count wrong for group #1 (24808, counted=24812).
Fix<y>? yes

Free blocks count wrong for group #59 (5029, counted=5141).
Fix<y>? yes

Free blocks count wrong (1173525, counted=1173641).
Fix<y>? yes


Files: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
Files: 29/981120 files (10.3% non-contiguous), 786281/1959922 blocks

After running the verify data, I lost about half a download (no big deal, 100 mb max).
Is this a HW or Software problem?
If it is a FS problem, then its probably caused by some accidental shutdown or reboot without unmounting.
The flash drive is pretty much brand new (bought it 2 days ago), so I dont think is hw related, but what do you think?

(the flash drive is a 8GB Kingston formated with ext2)
Thanks.

Update: left it running for about 30 minutes and it happened again.
 This is getting weirder by the minute, now I get a bunch of "resset high speed usb device" and it starts doing weird things, I think is the kernel, so I am going to wipe this out and install gentoo.

[plugit]

FYI, I torrent 24/7 and my plug has been stable forever. I'm not dumping to flash; I have a terabyte of external disk on the USB connection.

Just a point of reference...

[karurosu]

I actually found the problem by mistake.
It turns out there are a couple of fluorescent lights in my room that I rarely use (too much light and energy usage), some recent repairs to the roof damaged the ballast, so now they flicker and make weird noises. The point of the story is that somebody turned them on whle I was using the plug (serial opened and 2 ssh sessions) and out of a sudden the USB started failing and my sheeva went berserk.
After turning the lights off (shouting: "turn them off! turn them off!") and a fsck later, everything is back to normal, and the plug has been running without problems for 12 hours.
It seems the lights while flickering generate lots of electronic noise, since also my home theater makes weird noises when the lights are on. And btw, the solutions was far more simple than I expected: I just taped a message to the light's switch: "Don't use".

[karurosu]

This is weird, I was using my plug, went to eat and when I got back (about an hour later) the following was happening:

Code:

EXT2-fs error (device sda1): ext2_get_inode: unable to read inode block - inode=446200, block=885364
EXT2-fs error (device sda1): ext2_get_inode: unable to read inode block - inode=446200, block=885364
EXT2-fs error (device sda1): ext2_get_inode: unable to read inode block - inode=446200, block=885364

had to reboot and tftp into it, then repair the drive.
There were no lights on (as far as I know) so I am getting worried, is tehre any way to know if it was caused by something else?

Thanks.

Just as a side note, I am worrying a bit here, I dont want my plug crashing so often (20 hours is the average uptime I've had), what can I do to fix/improve this situation? would enable ext3 help me?