My Book Essentials - Crashing/Unavailable

The external drive that I'm using is found here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136395&cm_re=my_book-_-22-136-395-_-Product

It is the 1tb Western Digital Essentials external drive. It is hooked up to my file server via a USB drive. I'm going to give some background information on the server itself to explain the situation. If you don't want to read it, skip the following section

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Server background/experience

I run a CentOS 5.5 based linux server. The hardware is just a normal motherboard/CPU, but it is in a server case and rack. There are two main drives that I use for storage. The biggest one is my RAID 5 array and has nothing to do with this post, so I'm not going to talk about it. The second most used one is my external drive, which is attached to the server via a USB cable.

The drive is formatted as EXT4 and mapped to the following location:
/mnt/external

It is mounted on start-up and I use many scripts (most that run daily) that use this drive. I hit a problem last night which caused the server to lock up. I have a script that runs every 1st of the month that uses "dd" to backup the operating system drive to the external drive. The problem was, is that the external drive decided to drop completely off the end of the world, leaving the server with an unmapped drive. "/mnt/external" now pointed to the operating system tree instead of the external drive. Then the script ran, indefinitely. It caused the main drive to become completely full, to the very last bit. The server was under full load (disk I/O) all night and started denying Samba connections because it couldn't write to the system log (security issue). I couldn't initially find what was taking all the space, but I finally got it narrowed down. After deleting the file, the system started performing normally and worked great.

After the drive drops the connection, the only way to re-establish it is to completely power down the drive (unplug it) and plug it back in. Then it maps fine. I can't move it to another computer nor can I just unplug/replug the USB cable. Nothing fixes it except powering it down.

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So, I need to find out what is going on. This drive dropping out and becoming unresponsive is absolutely unacceptable on a server. I'm going to be dropping a few 1tb drive (not in RAID) in the server for the meantime, so I don't lose any data or have future issues like this.

Has anyone else had problems with these drives or know how to fix it?

I'm sure you've checked the obvious, but my Guitar Player's MyBook had a similar issue - it was simply a bad cable and was affected by minor vibration (well - three 18" JBL Subs isn't exactly a "minor vibration" - but you get the point ). IIRC we also had to power it down for it to re-connect even though it was only a cable issue...

Randyman... said:

I'm sure you've checked the obvious, but my Guitar Player's MyBook had a similar issue - it was simply a bad cable and was affected by minor vibration (well - three 18" JBL Subs isn't exactly a "minor vibration" - but you get the point ). IIRC we also had to power it down for it to re-connect even though it was only a cable issue...

Click to expand...

Does it with multiple cables, this is one of the first things I tried.

I missed that part of the equation Do any other USB devices have issues on this server? Maybe it's just a bad USB enclosure (heat related perhaps)? I'd rip out the drive and just buy a new enclosure with a descent USB bridge chip in it for $20-30 or so. I'm not a fan of the WD MyBook my guitar player has, but that's me...

Randyman... said:

I missed that part of the equation Do any other USB devices have issues on this server? Maybe it's just a bad USB enclosure (heat related perhaps)? I'd rip out the drive and just buy a new enclosure with a descent USB bridge chip in it for $20-30 or so. I'm not a fan of the WD MyBook my guitar player has, but that's me...

Click to expand...

The drive goes to sleep after 5 minutes and barely gets warm during heavy usage. The drive would have actually been off when it disconnected the server.

See if it happens on another PC. Run through some trial and error until the issue is weeded out. I'm thinking it's just a flaky USB bridge chip, or the fact that it goes to sleep is causing issues - or the server's USB port/chip if flakey (never mentioned if the server had issues with other USB peripherals or if they were tested with other peripherals). Or even a perfect storm combination of the Bridge Chip and MoBo USB tolerances meeting at opposite extremes.

The fact that you have to power it down (even across PC's) leads me towards a bad USB Bridge Chip - but that's just my hunch. This is the same behavior I saw with a bad cable scenario -and I don't like my Guitar Player's WD MyBook as stated above . I want to say his still drops offline from time to time, but he doesn't leave it connected 24/7.

Again, it could be the perfect storm tolerance corruption deal - so try the drive on a different PC (while it's working properly) and see if you lose connection in the same manner.



About the only way to find out what's up is to troubleshoot the physical devices. Fun stuff

Well, that is the problem, I can't really plug it into another computer. I can physically plug it into my main computer, but I can't use it normally without formatting it (which I'm not doing). I firmly believe it is the electronics in the casing as the old external drive never had issues.

And now it isn't being recognized by the server, even after power cycling. Awesome.

I'd look into another brand IMO I prefer the Oxford Bridge Chips myself...