How to Safely Remove a USB External Drive in Ubuntu 12.10

The USB 3.0 device is not providing latency info.

When you connect a USB device the kernel provides a 10ms delay for the device to initialize, then the kernel begins sending commands to the device.

The delay is hard coded into the kernel for USB2.0 devices, but for 3.0 devices the value is configurable and is provided by the device.

If the device does not provide the latency value for the kernel, the kernel will never send commands to the drive because it will wait forever.

The only way to fix this is to either get a different drive enclosure (yours is broken) or patch the kernel to use the default latency in USB3.0, which would be very difficult and possibly also break other things.

This is known problem with latest 4.4.0-139-generic, 4.4.0-140-generic and 4.4.0-141-generic Linux kernels.
On launchpad it is known as bug 1803929 (currently confirmed by 17 users).

The temporary solution is to use 138 ( 4.4.0-138-generic ) kernel.

So I have deleted 139, 140 and 141 kernels by:

sudo apt-get purge linux-image-4.4.0-139-generic linux-headers-4.4.0-139-generic \
linux-image-4.4.0-140-generic linux-headers-4.4.0-140-generic \
linux-image-4.4.0-141-generic linux-headers-4.4.0-141-generic
sudo apt-get install amd64-microcode intel-microcode thermald
sudo apt-get autoremove

and wait for 142+ kernel with the fix.

Warning: do not upgrade kernel to 4.4.0-139-generic, 4.4.0-140-generic or 4.4.0-141-generic if you need to keep your data safe on USB 3.0 external disks. Subscribe to the bug 1803929 and after the confirmation of the fix - install newest kernel back with sudo apt-get install linux-image-generic linux-headers-generic .