Hard drive connected by USB dropping during busy writes, and network then stalls.

[robo989]

I have this issue which has gone on for 2-3 years on my Avoton C2750 setup.
Components are all Freenas friendly.

A1SAi-2750F

Motherboard - Super Micro A1SAi-2750F
CPU - soldered
RAM - 32GB ECC DDR3
Storage controller - IBM 1015 crossflashed / LSI in passthrough mode
System - DOM
Jails - SSD

Everything runs smoothly on this box apart from a few instances.

I have jails setup for torrent and usenet applications. These applications are set to initially download to an SSD I use exclusively for this.
When download is finished the resulting data is set to extract to my external USB hard drive.
When this happens, the connection to the jails in question disconnects..
Every now and again freenas will drop the usb hard drive from the system that can only be recovered from with a reboot to discover the drive again.
Other issue is that during this time when the data is being extracted, the network for shares drops through floor and stalls.

This has been annoying me for so long but I've just setup a tvheadend jail connected to a SAT-IP box and would really like to find out what is going wrong to cause this stalling/dropping/etc.

Thanks

 

[sretalla]

You're going to hear that USB drives are not reliable and should be avoided from a bunch of folks here... not me, but you should expect it.

It may be worthwhile looking into your options to update the USB controller (buy a new external enclosure) and replace the USB cable (I recently had a bad one on one of my test systems where I have USB connected disks... not sure how it came to be bad, but would work for a little while, then drop).

I'm sure that dropping a disk is going to give the system a bunch of logging and other retry stuff to do which may be behind the network issues you see.

Clearly, you're going to have better results with that disk if you attach it to a SAS/SATA controller in some way (depending on your system case, internally being ideal).