Arch Linux

becho4

Member

From: Galicia, Spain

Registered: 2004-12-09

Posts: 84

Unreliable ext3 with USB disk

I bought an external Maxtor USB 160 GB disk 3 years ago.
I formatted it with only one ext3 partition for the hole disk.
3 months after it was corrupted and I lost everything.
Formatted it again the same way and yesterday got corrupted again.
I lost everything again.

I read everywhere on the internet that the ext3 is one of the safest filesytems.
I only use it to store films and music and always connect it to Arch Linux PCs. I run fsck on the partition from time to time.

I run 5 PCs with Arch Linux and ext3 and never had such a problem. Sometimes fsck finds some minor problem and fixes it.

Does it happen to everyone or just me?
Is ext3 less reliable with large partitions or USB disks?
Am I doing something wrong?
What can I do to improve reliability?

daneel971

Member

Registered: 2008-03-28

Posts: 197

Re: Unreliable ext3 with USB disk

I can confirm that ext3 works perfectly on external devices - esata, usb, or fw 400/800. My external hds are smaller than yours, except for one - so for, no problem with it (cross fingers).
You can try to extract the hd from its enclosure, place it into a PC and run a diagnostic program: Seatools runs from a floppy or a cd and supports both Seagate and Maxtor drives. You can get it from Seagate's site.

iphitus

Forum Fellow

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2004-10-09

Posts: 4,927

Re: Unreliable ext3 with USB disk

have you been unmounting the disk correctly?

becho4

Member

From: Galicia, Spain

Registered: 2004-12-09

Posts: 84

Re: Unreliable ext3 with USB disk

I installed the Seatools and the disk passed the tests so I think it is not a hardware problem.

I always try to umount the disk correctly but sometimes I can't because of a computer freeze or a blackout.

When there is a blackout and the computer reboots, it forces the check of the internal disks during the startup but not the USB disk. Is there a way to automate the USB disk check?. I always do it manually from time to time with fsck.

ruscook

Member

From: Sydney Australia

Registered: 2007-08-27

Posts: 105

Website

Re: Unreliable ext3 with USB disk

I have a Western Digital 1TB external USB drive. It works perfectly on my Dell server with XFS. I bought another for my desktop and put EXT3 on it. All was fine till one day when I tried (powered off) a different USB port - which must be flaky and it corrupted the disk over a period of time (about a month). I'm not blaming ext3, but it couldn't recover the partition properly. Luckily I could mount it manually and get the data off it.

I've gone back to XFS and the original port. With 380GB of the 1TB used, I'm not taking any more chances :-)

Russ