Swap partition causing USB instability?

[Buld]

From time to time (once a week) data was unreadable from USB disk with I/O errors. Rebooting didn't help but if
I turned the WL500gx off (power cycled) then it was working again and filesystem was OK as if nothing has been written on it after the trouble started.

I was thinking my USB disk is at the end of its lifetime but I gave it another chance so I reformatted it without a swap partition and started using a second USB stick for swap.

After a few days the same problem appeared. I turned off swap (deleted "swapon ..." from post-boot) and since then it works like a charm.

Anyone seen this? Could using a swap partition cause USB instability?

I created my swap partition as explained on macsat site (marked partition as Linux Swap) but when I do 'df' this partition is mounted (/dev/discs/disc1/part1)

$ df
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 3008 3008 0 100% /
/dev/discs/disc0/part1 121859 50043 65524 43% /opt
/dev/discs/disc1/part1 31712 28789 2923 91% /tmp/harddisk

Allthough I did this in post-boot:

#!/bin/sh
# wait for /opt to mount
umount /tmp/harddisk
umount /tmp/harddisk/part1
#
mount /dev/discs/disc0/part1 /opt
...

Why did this partition remount and could it be the cause of trouble?

Thanks in advance guys!

[Buld]

I'm still having this issue appear one in a while. I believe it is the USB driver that causes instability. My USB stick is 1.1 only and that may be it. Any idea how to troubleshoot this?

Thank, B

[Tamadite]

What you say makes me feel there something wrong in your configuration since the df command only displays information about active non-swap partitions.

Why don't you run

fdisk -l

to see how your partitions look like?

[oleo]

Instability is causing FLASH wear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_levelling

[Tamadite]

I do not think that is my case since my pen driver works perfectly under any other conditions and I do not have had problems with it in any other environment neither. I can boot my PC from it and I can still write&delete files on it. I'm pretty sure something has happened with my pen drive that only my wl500g can "detect".