Accessing external HDD causing Fedora 17 system to halt

[jreeseUE]

Hello, I have a 1TB WD HDD attached to a Compaq nc6320 laptop running Fedora 17 which is mounted in fstab via:

dev/sdb2       /media/cavalry            auto     rw,suid,dev,exec,noauto,nouser,async  0       0

Recently, on 2 separate occasions doing multiple access to the drive caused the system to halt and needed to be rebooted. The first instance was scanning a directory of a large amount of music files to index for gnump3d. The second instance was copying a large file over the network via rsync with a bwlimit of 750kB/s. I'm wondering if anyone has experienced anything similar and has any advice. The only idea I have currently is that the rate of access is for some reason causing the system to halt. Thanks in advance.

[PatMcLJr]

dunno, what's the format on the drive?

[jreeseUE]

ext4:

/dev/sdb2: LABEL="mybook" UUID="f8483e27-5517-47e7-860d-a9952b050b24" TYPE="ext4"

[MauserM98]

Is it connected via SATA cable? If so I have had simmilar problems due to bad connection/bad cable.
I changed cable and voila no problem ever again.

Sent from my HTC Incredible S using Tapatalk 2

[jreeseUE]

Right, I meant to mention that in my original post. It is connected via a USB cable.

[jreeseUE]

I would just like to add that I've had success transferring files via rsync with a --bwlimit of 100kB/s which again seems to suggest that the rate of access is causing the system to halt. Does this cause any bells of ideas to be rung with anyone out there?

[jreeseUE]

anyone have any ideas on this?

[PatMcLJr]

it's going to depend on how important this is to you

try to eliminate some of the variables
can you take the drive out of the usb housing and put in your box or one on your network?
do you have the same problem similar operations from your systems disk?
can you move the files with cp from the command line?
any errors showing up in the system log?
can you monitor the memory usage while the operation are going on? I'm kinda guessing that your system isn't actually halted but gaged to a crawl when it starts trying swap.
anything getting hot when your operation is going on? I have a tower that I use a box fan on in the summer, it cools everything in the box.

OK theres some brain storms for you, aka bs.

please post back if you figure it out