A solution to I/O errors on some external USB 3 HDD enclosures

I bought several Inatek fe 3001 USB HDD enclosures for my backups.

This model is reported like this by $ lsusb:

ID 174c:55aa ASMedia Technology Inc. Name: ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1053E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1153 SATA 3Gb/s bridge, ASM1153E SATA 6Gb/s bridge

Suddenly I got read error from input device (I/O error) from $ dmesg and then the filesystem unmounted automatically.

I tried:

• remounting the filesystem
• swapping cables
• swapping enclosures
• formatting the hard drives with a different filesystem,

Nohing worked.

Apparently, to get the thing working, you must disable UAS (USB Attached SCSI) for this particular chipset.

Solution #

If you use Syslinux as the bootloader and certain kernels:

1. add the following kernel parameter to the APPEND line in /boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg:

   usb-storage.quirks=174c:55aa:u
   

2. reboot
3. run $ lsusb -t and check that the Driver entry now reads usb-storage instead of uas

This works for example with Parabola GNU/Linux-libre.

Some websites say to blacklist the module within /etc/modprobe.d. That depends on your kernel.

References #

• Stack Exchange
• Ubuntu Forums
• Stack Exchange
• Reddit
• linux-sunxi.org
• Blacklist
• Arch Wiki
• Raspberry PI forum
• Launchpad
• bugzilla.kernel.org
• Gentoo Forum