External HDD problem

[daill]

Hey there,

I am on my way to build my own NAS based on FreeBSD 10. At the moment I'm experiencing a problem with my external USB HDD which is formatted with UFS . The case is as follows, I mount the USB drive and everything is working fine. But after a few hours the USB drive seems to go to power saving mode. After that FreeBSD shows an active mount but I'm not able to write any files to it. When I try to unmount it I get the "Device is busy" message. After a reboot and try to mount FreeBSD states me that I have to run fsck(8) in order to clean the file system. How can avoid this behaviour? I would be grateful for any help.

Regards,
daill

 

[jb_fvwm2]

If it is due to power-saving,

 while: ; do sleep 60 && (rm /mnt/file ; touch /mnt/file ); done

... Or a similar [debugged or improved ] command, maybe in the background. (&)

 

[ralphbsz]

This is not a helpful suggestion, just sharing my frustration with a similar problem:

I used to use a USB-based disk for my backup (this disk is connected via a long cable, and physically sits in a large safe with thick walls). Between power saving mode, and generally quirky USB, I figured out that USB is just not ready for 24x7 operation. I had to reboot every few days, deal with crashes of my backup program once a day, and unmount/remount the file system about that frequency. Since I also suspected that the problem was caused by the drive going idle, I had a script start a full ZFS scrub all the time (it ran every few minutes, watched whether a scrub was running, and there wasn't one running started another one). Didn't help either.

I switched to a SATA disk, new enclosure, and an eSATA cable. Works like a charm now. The afflicted USB disk is now being used as a "use once in a while" drive on a laptop, where it does the job really well.

 

[daill]

Hey,

Thanks four your suggestions and for the hint with the script. But I think I walk along with @ralphbsz and choose another connector and try it again.

Regards,
daill