USB <-> SATA adapters

[Dan MacDonald]

I have a:

Bus 001 Device 004: ID 1bcf:0c31 Sunplus Innovation Technology Inc. SPIF30x Serial-ATA bridge

Which connects my OCZ Octane SATA2 SSD to my Panda.

I woke this morning to find my Panda wasn't booting and Ubuntu wanted to check the filesystem- and it just didn't stop! I left it for hours with no real progress made so then I plugged it into my Debian laptops USB port with the same SATA adapter and ran fsck manually on it and again it blinked away for hours before I had the good sense to plug it directly into my laptops SATA adapter and fsck from systemrescuecd. As soon as I did that all my fs errors were fixed with 5s or so!

I updated the firmware on my SSD only a week or two ago so that is unlikely the issue here but what I'd like to know is are there better USB <-> SATA adapters that do let you successfully fsck a ext4 SSD or is this one of the limitations of the adapters and/or Linux and fsck?

I've not yet noticed any issues when using this drive and adapter as an external drive with other machines but it frequently seems to 'drop out' on my pandaboard where I have to reboot to see/ access any files on my HD.

The other issue with my Panda HD which I've been meaning to raise on this list since I first used it is that every time I boot up, the last message I get on the first boot screen that Ubuntu makes visible on a DVI/HDMI output says:

ata_id[1070]: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed for '/dev/sda': Invalid argument

What I can't tell you is how stable this HD is with any other, more stable distros on my Panda but I'm interested to know if others are seeing these drive issues under Precise too which is all I've run on it since I got it.

Thanks!

Dan