Lockups with USB disks on FreeBSD

[David Jackson]

I am currently using FreeBSD 8.0. I have been, for a long time, been 
having problems with lockups of FreeBSD 8.0 when using USB hard disks. 
Sometimes certain applications lock up for several minutes, when they 
use the disk, file operations are very slow, and sometimes the entire 
operating system can lock up for several minutes. This can be a pretty 
painful thing and makes the system seem very unstable. I am using UFS 
filesystems on the disks. It seems to happen on multiple disks that i use.

I was hopeful changes to the FreeBSD USB drivers might have improved 
things but they are as bad as ever.

Help is appreciated.