USB-disconnect error: "Synchronize Cache(10) failed:"

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1

Hi everybody,

just recognized an unknown error, as i checked my actual log with journalctl -f.

When i unmounted my Backup-USB-disk with unmount /path/to/disk and then pulled the cable out, a short unhealthy noise occured inside the USB-disk. Wasn’t the first time.

I checked the log (for another reason) and found following lines:

Aug 02 23:41:19 USER kernel: usb 4-1: USB disconnect, device number 2
Aug 02 23:41:19 USER kernel: sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Synchronizing SCSI cache
Aug 02 23:41:19 USER kernel: sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Synchronize Cache(10) failed: Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK

Does anybody know, what this is about? Searched the Web on a quick try, but couldn’t find anything concrete; just that it may be a bad sign for my USB-drive.

Would be nice to know, because the USB-drive is used on my daily Cron-job for backing up my home directory with different snapshots.

Cheers,
Florian

2

You heard a noise and are getting errors? That’s all I need to know, backup your data and get a new drive. It’s only a matter of time.

1 Like
3

Hi,
maybe the drive is running on his last Bytes, but on the other side, it is only a few years old and seldomly used, so i would like to give it another try.
When i unmount the drive, it keeps summing like it’s still working. After up to 30 minutes the summing noise stops. If i pull the cable then, it doesn’t make this awful noise. So maybe it’s still working with the cache after i run umount, but 30 minutes seem very long. Therefore i tried running sync before unmounting, but didn’t change anything.
Does anyone know how to disable the drives cache completely? Want to test if this may change something.
Best,
Florian

4

Are you referring to the write buffer?

If so, look into the sync option when using mount or the fstab.

However, I think it’s best to consider this external USB drive as dead. I wouldn’t trust it to keep my data safe.

If you’re referring to the drive’s own internal cache, then I’m not sure that’s possible, since it’s at the firmware-level.

Again, regardless, not worth it in my opinion.

That doesn’t matter. Digital storage and disk drives are not like lightbulbs.

5

did you wait for the command to finish? … the prompt is back …

but that noise you describe, together with:

Aug 02 23:41:19 USER kernel: sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Synchronize Cache(10) failed: Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK

points to a faulty drive

6

Hi,

sorry for the late response, was busy.

Yes, tried it in fstab and manually with sync [device]—didn’t worked out.

Just gave sdparm a try and disabled Write Cache—but also no positive result…

Yes, of ourse. The prompt is back after half a second, but the dirve sounds like it keeps working for about 30 minutes. Also waited that span and pulled it out afterwards. Didn’t changed the result either.

So, it seems i have to accept that the drive will be gone in the near future. I’m going to buy a new one.

Thanks for your help. Any advices for a good SSD USB drive with 0.5 to 1 TB space? Shouldn’t be too expensive—maybe up to 80–100 Euros…

Best

7

For all intents and purposes, it is “gone”. If you don’t have any backups of the data the currently resides on it, I would make a read-only drive image of if using ddrescue that you can later use in the future if you need to try to recover data. I say this because it’s within plausibility for the drive to catastrophically fail when you attempt to do a massive copy operation from the old drive to the newly-purchased drive.