Crucial M4 64GB SSD hard drive unstable

April 30th, 2012

This morning my computer started acting funky presenting me with I/O errors on my root hard drive after a few minutes.  Turns out the Crucial’s M4 SSD drives have a firmware glitch in some versions where after a little over 5100 hours of operation the stop working reliably.  So I upgraded my firmware from 0009 to 000F and that fixed the problem.  After running a SMART test on the drive after the upgrade it noted that I had hit the magic number a few hours prior.

Weird USB error messages on Arch Linux

April 29th, 2012

I was getting weird USB error messages on Arch Linux such as:

  • USB …. error -62
  • Along lag at boot at the “Waiting for udev events to process”
  • USB 1-2 not accepting address 2.

I have a Gigabyte 990x AUD3 motherboard and a Western Digital external hard drive.  I was running kernel version 3.3.3-1 x86_64, and after endless troubleshooting I just downgrade my kernel to 3.3.2-1 and that fixed all my problems.

USB Drives do not create a /dev/ Node on Arch Linux

April 14th, 2012

When plugging in a USB stick or USB hard drive no /dev/sdX node was being created.  lsusb and dmesg showed that the device was detected yet still no node. It turns our for me that for some reason the modules usb-storage and uas were not being loaded.

modprobe usb-storage
modprobe uas

Running the above commands as root resolved my problems and now the /dev/sdX nodes are being properly created. To make this change permanent add these modules to /etc/rc.conf.