Digitus DA 70148 USB adapter & Linux

I have a rather old fileserver with VIA Epia mainboard without SATA and 400GB IDE disks in RAID5 running at my parent’s. Since 1TB disks have become reasonable cheap and with the dark cloud of multiple disk failures constantly looming above the server, I decided to buy a 1TB SATA disk and the Digitus DA 70148 IDE/SATA to USB 2.0 adapter — primarily for backup reasons. Since I am a lazy person the server is still running a Debian with 2.4.34.4 kernel and this is how the story continues…

modprobe usb-storage usb-uhci ehci-hcd

After loading those modules something was detected:

scsi1 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
  Vendor: ST310003  Model: 33AS              Rev:
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02

Then something weird happened, dmesg mentioned two devices:

Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0

… but fdisk -l on sda just resulted in

sda: Spinning up disk.......................................................................................................not responding...
sda : READ CAPACITY failed.

So I tried with sdb and that worked much better and after partitioning all 1000GB were available:

Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1      121601   976760001   83  Linux

Creating the filesystem sure took a while…

real    26m22.344s

… and the speed is pretty much as expected:

/dev/sdb:
 Timing cached reads:   130 MB in  2.02 seconds =  64.36 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   42 MB in  3.03 seconds =  13.86 MB/sec

Then I wanted to mount the partition, but that was stuck again, and dmesg was full with messages like this (and the busy LED on the adapter was constantly on):

hub.c: new USB device 00:10.3-1, assigned address 105
usb.c: USB device not accepting new address=105 (error=-71)

I dis- and reconnected the USB, the busy LED stayed dark after that, the disk was now detected as sda only and mounting was successful. After about an hour of copying data onto the disk write failure happened and dmesg was again full of the above errors.

So I thought maybe I should update to the latest 2.6 kernel (2.6.18 in this case), there must have been quite a few USB changes, maybe that was fixed. Unfortunately it was not, but the error message slightly changed:

usb 4-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 75
usb 4-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 4-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71

I found some other mentions of such a problem, but no solutions. One suggestion was adding kernel parameters “acpi=off noapic” which did not help in my case or simply not loading ehci_hcd… but what good is a 1TB disk with USB 1.0?
So, concluding: a USB/SATA adpater is a great idea in theory, but definitely does not work well with Linux.

UPDATE:
I have had a Quickport pro for a few months now and it is working perfectly via USB or ESATA with Linux. Backing up to cheap 1TB drives was never that easy… :)