I have been having what seems like this issue with both LaCie and Seagate external drives when connected to USB 3 ports.
I just had connections to a server freeze and found this message when I went to the physical display (I can share a low quality image of the full screen if that helps): [309540.436290] BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 00000...0000f0 [309540.436313] IP: [<ffff...>] _raw_spin_lock_irq_save+0x1f/0x60 ... [309540.533342] Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception in interrupt [309540.533366] Kernel Offset: 0x0 from 0xff[... hard to count characters] [309540.533389] drm_kms_helper: panic occurred, switching back to text console I have encountered the general issue of USB hard dive in USB 3 port freezing with three different devices running Ubuntu 14.04 over the last few months. The devices are: 1. a Dell laptop that came shipped with Windows that I installed Ubuntu on (not running very well, so I did not think anything of it) 2. a Dell Precision M3800 that came shipped with Ubuntu 14.04 - not sure exact revision when bug presented because I learned never to plug USB drives into USB 3 ports on the laptop, but today it has Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS 3. just now, I caused a kernel panic on a Lenovo ThinkServer that has Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS - at this point I thought I should log this. Additional version info is: Linux version 3.16.0-50-generic (buildd@lgw01-03) (gcc version 4.8.2 (Ubuntu 4.8.2-19ubuntu1) ) #67~14.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 2 22:07:51 UTC 2015 (Ubuntu 3.16.0-50.67~14.04.1-generic 3.16.7-ckt16) Note: the symptom for #1 and #2 was that plugging a drive into a USB 3 port caused the computer to 'freeze' - not much useful Finally, things work fine with all three computers iff I am careful to use only the USB 2 ports with the LaCie or with the Seagate drives. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Kernel Packages, which is subscribed to linux in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1242321 Title: USB 3.0 Harddrive not recognised Status in linux package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: Ubuntu is not recognising any device plugged into any USB 3.0 ports. Sometimes Ubuntu will freeze for a few seconds when you plug something into a USB 3.0 port; when Ubuntu comes out of the freeze, the device is still NOT recognised. No problems with USB 2.0 ports and devices. The USB 3.0 on this computer only works in Windows 7 (I'm dual booting Ubuntu 13.10 and Windows 7, both are 64-bit). To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1242321/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kernel-packages Post to : kernel-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kernel-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp