Description of problem: This broke sometime since RHEL 4U1, or possibly due to a change of mainboard to Tyan S2866. Upon inserting USB connection 'dmesg' shows usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using address 2 usb 1-1: control timeout on ep0in usb 1-1: device not accepting address 2, error -71 And drive fails to insert. Googled the above and found that running rmmod ehci_hcd first fixes the problem. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 2.6.9-55.0.12.ELsmp
Forget about the strange 'rmmod' workaround, the USB disk drivers do not work anymore. Tried copying a bunch of big files to the disk. Data write rate per 'iostat' was a paltry 1MB/sec until 1.5GB of data had been copied. Then it screeched to a dead stop. 'iostat' said that 0 kb/s were being transferred at 9 tps. This went on for 30 minutes. A 'sync' command just hung. Had to unplug the USB cable to get it out of the bizarre state. This definitely used to work! Gave up on RHEL and plugged the drive into a Windows 2003 R2-SP2 X64 server. Formatted the drive as NTFS and the copy is now humming along nicely at 16.5MB/sec. RHEL is a commercial grade OS? Not in my book. This is an amateur regression if ever there was one. Also just finished wrestling with 'st' tape driver regressions, bug 410231 and bug 411131. Might be time to try out SLES. I know a couple of companies that have made the switch.
Looks like solution was found, closing.
Not a Red Hat solution however.