Samba won't handle too much files

[kopec]

Hi,
I have got the latest (1.9.2.7-7c) Oleg's firmware on WL500gX router and 300GB Maxtor external USB HDD.
I configured my Samba so I have one FAT32 300GB share (I need to be able exchanging files with both wl500gx and Win machines and without installing an EXT driver). Everything has worked fine until I copied my entire 9300+ mp3 files archive on the HDD. Now everytime I try to browse to it (using TotalCommander, but tried also Windows Explorer) everything locks up. When I run Putty and "top" I see usb-storage-0 and smbd together taking up about 60% of CPU

97 admin RW 0 1 43.3 0.0 usb-storage-0
170 admin DW 0 121 19.2 0.0 smbd

and although it indicates they're using 0% of memory, the memory is almost completely full.

Mem: 28720K used, 1420K free, 0K shrd, 18780K buff, 1792K cached

From now, I amnot able to browse the shared folders at all. (And I tried even waiting for few hours) Now I have to reboot the router, which is not good because I have an IRC bot running there (but it is certainly not caused by it)

Please, how can I avoid this? Having my MP3 archive there is essential for me.

I've had this exact configuration working one time, byt there were some files with a czech language characteristic symbols and so they were unusable. Now I renamed them to english symbol set and copied them back. That is the only change I have made.

[kopec]

I've tried to "ipkg install samba" and use that one (newer version v3 - in the firmware there is v2) but i am not able to run it, it says "Bad system call" when starting the smbd daemon. Please could anybody help me????

[oleo]

You should format partition into ext3 system and shorten the USB cable to about 40cm. And maybe some capacitor 200uF near the HD supply. I have WD 3200 320GB disk running for at least a year w/o problems.

[kopec]

Well, I NEED fat32 filesystem, and my USB is short enough. the problem, which I have now fixed, was that on some error during writing a nonsense named subfolders appeared. The folders that made samba crash, my widows machine it was OK, but couldn't delete them. So I made linux to delete it and for now it is ok, although slow (3 and more secondes accesing this folder), but ok.

And why is it not possible to install (&use) Samba-3??? Some collision with the firmware-included Samba?