Well, I was at work for a brief moment, where I grabbed me one of our SATA->USB bridges, since I need to migrate some (~750GB) data of the old raid-array and onto a new one. The troublesome about that is simply, that the current RAID controller only supports four attached devices, that’s why I do have to use something like this … Sure I could have bought a new RAID controller, but why spend 45+ EUR on something, that you can solve differently ?

Well, after figuring that I need to change my kernel config yet again (didn’t have USB support till Tue Dec 23 ~16:45:00 CET 2008) I attached the adapter to two adjacent USB ports. And shortly after copying 4-10MB, the transfer would result in a read-only EXT3 file system with something like this in the syslog:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30

Dec 23 17:23:57 epimetheus usb 1-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
Dec 23 17:23:57 epimetheus usb usb3: New USB device found, idVendor=1d6b, idProduct=0001
Dec 23 17:23:57 epimetheus usb usb3: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=2, SerialNumber=1
Dec 23 17:23:57 epimetheus usb usb3: Product: OHCI Host Controller
Dec 23 17:23:57 epimetheus usb usb3: Manufacturer: Linux 2.6.25-hardened-r11 ohci_hcd
Dec 23 17:23:57 epimetheus usb usb3: SerialNumber: 0000:00:02.1
Dec 23 17:23:57 epimetheus Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
Dec 23 17:23:57 epimetheus usb 1-2: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
Dec 23 17:23:57 epimetheus usb 1-2: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Dec 23 17:23:58 epimetheus usb 1-2: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
Dec 23 17:23:58 epimetheus usb 1-2: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Dec 23 17:23:58 epimetheus usb 1-2: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
Dec 23 17:23:58 epimetheus usb 1-2: device not accepting address 2, error -71
Dec 23 17:23:59 epimetheus usb 1-2: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
Dec 23 17:23:59 epimetheus usb 1-2: device not accepting address 2, error -71
Dec 23 17:23:59 epimetheus usb 1-2: USB disconnect, address 2
Dec 23 17:23:59 epimetheus sd 4:0:0:0: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery
Dec 23 17:23:59 epimetheus sd 4:0:0:0: [sde] Result: hostbyte=0x01 driverbyte=0x00
Dec 23 17:23:59 epimetheus end_request: I/O error, dev sde, sector 1229380295
Dec 23 17:23:59 epimetheus end_request: I/O error, dev sde, sector 1229380535
Dec 23 17:23:59 epimetheus Aborting journal on device sde1.
Dec 23 17:23:59 epimetheus ext3_abort called.
Dec 23 17:23:59 epimetheus EXT3-fs error (device sde1): ext3_journal_start_sb: Detected aborted journal
Dec 23 17:23:59 epimetheus Remounting filesystem read-only
Dec 23 17:23:59 epimetheus EXT3-fs error (device sde1) in ext3_ordered_writepage: IO failure
Dec 23 17:23:59 epimetheus __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_frozen_data
Dec 23 17:23:59 epimetheus __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_frozen_data
Dec 23 17:23:59 epimetheus __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_frozen_data
Dec 23 17:23:59 epimetheus __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_frozen_data
Dec 23 17:23:59 epimetheus __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data

Well, now what ? I googled a for a bit, apparently this happens when EHCI tries to write to the device and gets a timeout, cause the device is rather slow – or whatever (or the device drops down to USB 1.1). So, after disabling EHCI, the transfer has been running for about three hours now, and roughly only 1/12 of the data transferred to the external disk. Only trouble with that is, that even USB 1.1 is kinda slow to transfer 750GiB ❗

Followup: Well, due to USB 1.1 being slow as a snail, I went surfing for alternatives using Windows (since I know that the bridge does full USB 2.0 with Windows without any troubles). And guess what I found ? There’s an EXT2/3 device driver for Windows XP, yay! So I’m copying with full 100Mbit speed right now 🤷