USB weirdness

Well, I was at work for a brief moment, where I grabbed me one of our SATA->USB bridges, since I need to migrate some (~750GB) data of the old raid-array and onto a new one. The troublesome about that is simply, that the current RAID controller only supports four attached devices, that’s why I do have to use something like this … Sure I could have bought a new RAID controller, but why spend 45+ EUR on something, that you can solve differently ?

Well, after figuring that I need to change my kernel config yet again (didn’t have USB support till Tue Dec 23 ~16:45:00 CET 2008) I attached the adapter to two adjacent USB ports. And shortly after copying 4-10MB, the transfer would result in a read-only EXT3 file system with something like this in the syslog:

Well, now what ? I googled a for a bit, apparently this happens when EHCI tries to write to the device and gets a timeout, cause the device is rather slow — or whatever (or the device drops down to USB 1.1). So, after disabling EHCI, the transfer has been running for about three hours now, and roughly only 1/12 of the data transferred to the external disk. Only trouble with that is, that even USB 1.1 is kinda slow to transfer 750GiB ❗

Followup: Well, due to USB 1.1 being slow as a snail, I went surfing for alternatives using Windows (since I know that the bridge does full USB 2.0 with Windows without any troubles). And guess what I found ?
There’s an EXT2/3 device driver for Windows XP, yay! So I’m copying with full 100Mbit speed right now *shrug*