Severe instabilities and system lockups

[David Jackson]

I am still having severe problems with severe system instabilities with 
FreeBSD and have had these problrms in 7.1 and 8.0. The system randomly 
locks up, it appears applications lock up when they access the USb disk. 
Also, when accessing the USB disk, the entire system lockup often for 
minutes. Performance with accessing USB disks is horrendous,. it took 7 
hours to copy a directory that was 200 MB. Any program that accesses the 
USB disk tend to freeze for minutes, and often the entire system becomes 
unresponsive for minutes. Overall FreeBSD here is characterized by 
severe instabilities, ive had better performance from Windows 98 
systems. The fact that the entire system freezes up, this should not 
happen, a well designed system will not lock up the entire OS when 
accessing disk.

Are there any diagnostic tools uch as getting a log of tranmissions on 
USB and probe it, ,or finmd out what code it is lockilng up on ?Has 
anyone else seen these problems with USB disks?