Munir Nassar wrote: > Joshua Radke wrote: >> Note that the problem appeared to be much more pronounced (resetting >> every 10's of minutes instead of one to three times per day) when I >> had the PCI bus underclocked in the BIOS ... I have since gotten a >> better cooling solution, and no longer need to do that for stability. > it sounds to me like your hardware is suspect to begin with, if you > had to underclock the system to get stability out of it there is a > good chance something got damaged while it was overheating. it may be > that it is still overheating. > The underclocking was to manage temperature, since I had a bad heatsink/fan, poorly mounted (by me). First, I'd like to thank everyone for their contributions. I pounded on the system last weekend, and made a few more discoveries. The punch line is that I've retired the drive for live use, and will be using it for backups instead. I have replaced the original disk (Western Digital MyBook, 500gb - having problems), with another off brand 300 gb disk I had, and everything's 'better'. I got a chanced to stress them a bit while moving recordings between the two, and here's what I discovered: 1) I can read from the troubled drive while writing to the OK one full speed, and in the hours of copying, I never got a single reset. 2) I can (almost) guarantee a reset (or 2 to 8 resets per hour) by writing to the WD Mybook while also reading from it. 3) The WD caused no resets until it had about 50 GB (used) on it. Other things tried: e2fsck --force (ok) badblocks (ok) New USB cable (and 2 others I had laying around) Move Drive to all three different Mobo Available USB hubs. Conclusion (best guesses; I encourage smarter folks to refine/discard these on the list!) 1) Based on an Ubuntu support page I can't seem to find anywhere; In kernels newer than ~2.6.9, some combinations of USB external storage and USB chipsets 'just do this'. 2) I can't recommend Western Digital Mybooks for external storage (at least for streaming). 3) I can recommend ID 0c0b:b352 Dura Micro, Inc. (Acomdata) (from lsusb -v). This one was sold as a Cavalry “Pre-Formatted” CAUE37320 320GB. (buyer beware, these seem to have a fairly high DOA rate) 4) "Always back up your data" applies equally to media servers *laugh*. 5) On all external USB drives, do some serious concurrent Read/Write stress testing upon receipt so you can exchange if it's got issues. Thanks again, everyone! Josh