Problems with transfers to USB hard drive


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My problem - when I try to read from or write to a portable HDD over USB3 I get random hangups in the transfer. This is happening on both the on-board ports as well as a pcie USB expansion card.

 

Background: I decided to do a hardware refresh on my server. I purchased a Supermicro X10SAE motherboard and an e3-1226v3 off ebay, both items were used. Everything else RAM, PSU, SATA cables, fans, etc were all existing hardware that I had and was not experiencing any issues with. As part of this refresh I also purchased 2 x 8TB HDDs to replace a 2TB and 3TB drive that were already in my array.

 

After I got the hardware up and running I ran MS prime for 24 hours with no errors. I then installed the two new 8TB drives and a spare 2TB drive I had into the server and ran simultaneous preclears on all three drives until I had cleared both new drives 3 times. No issues were noted at all while running the preclears.

 

I then moved the drives from my existing server into my new server. Three of the six drives in my array were still on RFS so I used the two new 8TB drives to go through the process of converting the three RFS drives over to XFS. Once that was complete I re-organized a pretty disorganized photography library. I mention all this because in order to do all of these things I exclusively used rsync via the terminal to move a ton of files around between array drives. In total I'd estimate that I performed around 15TB of total rsync transfers between array drives. I had no issues at all during this time.

 

Once I had finished all of this on the server I then tried to add some files from a HFS+ formatted drive onto the array. That is when the problems started. I was transferring the files using rsync and the operation would just hang. The progress on terminal would just stop and the disk throughput on the main GUI would drop to zero. Nothing was reported in the log file. I took that same portable HDD, plugged it into a macbook and transferred about 500GB of files onto my array over the network using rsync from the mac with no issues. I thought it might be a problem with the HFS+ formatting but maybe it wasn't, see the next paragraph.

 

At that point I now had all of my photo library organization done and I wanted to backup some files on my array to a different portable HDD. I formatted this HDD using exFAT. Using rsync I started copying files onto the portable HDD but the same thing happened - random hangs, I/O drops to zero on GUI, no errors in logfile. Again this happens with both onboard USB3 as well as the pcie USB expansion card. I plugged that same HDD into a windows machine and wrote ~250GB of files to it with no issues.

 

So I am now scratching my head. I'm thinking it has to be one of the following possible issues:

1) Bad motherboard (something in the PCH)?

2) Driver or kernel issue with USB3? I doubt this is the issue because the pcie expansion card was in my old server and worked without issues for large file transfers just prior to the start of my hardware refresh.

 

I'm eliminating the CPU and RAM because how could they only have problems when performing USB3 transfers but not SATA transfers?? Maybe I'm wrong here.

 

My plan is to swap the array back into my old server (different MB, CPU, RAM, PSU, and case) and see if the problem goes away. After all that "background" I guess I'm just looking for any other ideas that the community might have as to how to isolate the culprit. Am I missing something? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Edited by wsume99
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5 hours ago, Benson said:

Have you try different USB-SATA bridge ? ( undersatnd no issue on mac and windows machine )

I have not. I was searching last night about USB3 problems in linux and there are a lot of posts on various distros and hardware where users had problems similar to mine. It appears that the kernel is very buggy with USB3 devices. Thanks for the suggestion I'll look into it.

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The reason I ask is because try on different USB SATA bridge should be easy.

 

I use a UASP 5 bay enclosure with unraid about 1 yrs+, unraid won't support UASP. Those disk were array member and never have dropout. During put that in live, I make serious test under windows environment on same unraid machine first. I also try different kind of bridge and in general not much different found on windows or linux if talking about stability.

 

I found problem mainly on USB controller / bridge issue more then OS issue. Ple note there are so many different kind controller / bridge hardware in market.

 

Anyway I suggest you may try insert a USB hub(suggest VIA chips type) between then to verify problem gone or not.

Edited by Benson
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2 hours ago, Benson said:

The reason I ask is because try on different USB SATA bridge should be easy.

 

I use a UASP 5 bay enclosure with unraid about 1 yrs+, unraid won't support UASP. Those disk were array member and never have dropout. During put that in live, I make serious test under windows environment on same unraid machine first. I also try different kind of bridge and in general not much different found on windows or linux if talking about stability.

 

I found problem mainly on USB controller / bridge issue more then OS issue. There are so many differe controller / bridge in market.

If I understand what you are suggesting correctly I have already done this. The controller on the motherboard is different than the controller on the pci-e card. I have the same problem when I'm connected to either controller.

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