[NTLUG:Discuss] writing to a USB drive locks up server..

[Joe Torma]

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Three levels of pointers to data, huh?   Hm.. well, in my case the slow 
downs can come even from just formatting the drive.  So...no data on 
these drives yet.  Also, the slow down seems to be intermittent.   For a 
few days the server was accessing the USB drives just FINE, then for no 
decernable reason, things started getting slow and processes went into 
the Uninterruptible sleep  state.  IBM tech support mentioned that 
unterminated usb cables (cables plugged into the motherboard but not 
plugged into a device) can cause issues. (I don't know that I believe 
them on that, though.)

At this point we are moving the USB drives to a different server and 
seeing if the server can remain stable all by its lonesome.

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It sounds like auto-spin down is not the issue, but in the event that could
be causing problems I can point you to this which has saved me many, many
hours of hair pulling grief since I discovered it.  My experience has been
that the techniques work whether the targets are Seagate or not:

http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/FAQ/DealWithAutoSpinDownOnSeagateFreeAgent