USB HDD recommendations for FreeBSD 6.3/amd64 ?

[Toomas Aas]

Hello!

I've been using two identical WD MyBook 500 GB HDDs as a 'backup media' 
for almost a year. With FreeBSD 6.2 things worked fairly well. There was 
only one problem - after attaching the drive, it took 10-11 minutes for 
the drive to become available as da0. In my specific situation this 
problem was not too disturbing.

With 6.3, however, things are much worse. I'm experiencing really bad 
freezes when the several-gigabytes-big backup images are being transferred 
to the USB HDD. I've described the details in 
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=120321, so I won't repeat them 
all here. I'll just say again that as the problem happens with two 
identical drives and WD's diagnostics utility has verified one of them to 
be OK, I don't believe it to be hardware failure. Also, problems started 
immediately after upgrading to 6.3.

So, my current guess is that there is something about these drives that 
just doesn't sit well with FreeBSD 6.3. As I really do need to make 
backups, I'm willing to try another brand of HDD. So I hope to hear what 
kind of USB HDDs are you successfully using with FreeBSD 6.3.

Thanks in advance,
--
Toomas Aas
... The speed of time is one second per second.