This is why I quit using USB storage.
My friend Andrew seems to be having the standard silly sort of problems that one encounters when using USB mass storage devices for anything even slightly serious. I really don’t miss that collection of problems - I finally switched from using various USB-attached hard drives to using eSATA disks. Same disks, same enclosures, just a different controller in the host pc. It works sooooooo much better, and it’s faster. The assorted USB disks worked kinda acceptably when I was doing Linux software raid5, but failed miserably when I tried OpenSolaris. I’m glad something just forced the issue so I had to quit using a crappy setup.
I wish Andy luck with his USB storage setup, of course, and particularly the Zonbu hardware he’s messing with (which seems to be particularly neat), but I’m pretty happy with my nice stable SATA arrangement and ZFS :-)