A few months ago I bought an 8 GB USB Memory Stick (A Corsair Voyager) which did not work with my Linux machines. The syslog was reporting these errors (or similar) all the time:

usb 5-8: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 7
usb 5-8: device descriptor read/64, error -110
usb 5-8: device descriptor read/64, error -110
usb 5-8: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 8
usb 5-8: device descriptor read/64, error -110

I searched for information about this and found the problem.

Here you can find the thread about this issue in the Corsair forums. The information there is a bit misleading as there are a lot of solutions presented which don’t solve the problem.

In the Ubuntu Launchpad bug report there is more information and a workaround to get the Memory stick working.

The problems seems to be the inq_timeout. In Windows, this timeout is set to 20 per default, Linux uses just 5. As I wish to be able to use this memory stick without having to recompile or reinstall a new linux kernel on each linux computer I want to use it, I filed a kernel bug report and I hope they will adapt the timeout to 20, too.

At the moment the workaround is to modify or create the file /etc/modprobe.d/options and add the line:

options scsi_mod inq_timeout=20

As explained in the Ubuntu bug report as workaround. If you have the kernel scsi modules built in the kernel (not as loadable modules), you have to boot your kernel with:

scsi_mod.inq_timeout=20

As explained in the Kernel bug report.