Oy vey.
USB has always been “well, it kinda works”. So I shouldn’t have been surprised at these pains.
And I wasn’t.
I decided to store my DVDs on disk for rapid access. I bought USB3 devices. This is my story.
My first device was a single 6TB Western Digital Green disk in an Icy Box USB3 enclosure.
lsusb says:
Bus 004 Device 007: ID 05e3:0731 Genesys Logic, Inc. Device Descriptor: [...] idVendor 0x05e3 Genesys Logic, Inc. idProduct 0x0731 bcdDevice 90.84 iManufacturer 3 Raid Sonic iProduct 4 USB Storage Device iSerial 5 0000000000000000
The WD Green disk is quite nice. It’s very quiet.
The only problem is that whenever it goes to sleep, and it does that a lot, it goes missing from the Linux USB subsystem when you try to write to it.
Anyway, it was too small, so I bought a two-disk enclosure and made a RAID0 stripe over it. Another Icy Box USB3 device, as it happens.
I put two 6TB WD Red disks into it. This is what lsusb says:
Bus 004 Device 006: ID 067b:2773 Prolific Technology, Inc. [...] iManufacturer 1 ICY BOX iProduct 2 ICY BOX IB-3620 iSerial 3 PROLIFICMP0000002F1 [...] bInterfaceClass 8 Mass Storage bInterfaceSubClass 6 SCSI bInterfaceProtocol 80 Bulk-Only
It’s fast and nice, but the problem is that once in a while, whenever I try to read and write a lot to it, it freaks out.
Oct 15 00:29:53 stories kernel: [86720.343239] usb 4-1: reset SuperSpeed USB device number 5 using xhci_hcd Oct 15 00:29:53 stories kernel: [86720.356884] usb 4-1: device firmware changed Oct 15 00:29:53 stories kernel: [86720.357083] usb 4-1: USB disconnect, device number 5 Oct 15 00:29:53 stories kernel: [86720.357484] scsi 9:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
And the device goes to read-only, and you have to switch it off and then on again.
So either Western Digital makes lousy disks, or Icy Box makes awful USB3 enclosures, or the USB3 chipset sucks, or USB3 sucks, or Linux sucks.
Or all of the above.
The USB3 chip is
02:00.0 USB controller: NEC Corporation uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 03)
So naturally I bought an enclosure from a different manufacturer: SilverStone.
lsusb says:
Bus 004 Device 011: ID 152d:0539 JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technolo gy Corp. [...]
bInterfaceClass 8 Mass Storage bInterfaceSubClass 6 SCSI bInterfaceProtocol 80 Bulk-Only
And what do you know! It works! It’s kinda fast-ish, too. So I bought a tiny 7W computer with USB3 ports to put into a closet, and now I can watch movies without moving from the couch.
In conclusion: Icy Box sucks. So much.