Linux is to fast for todays hardware, I think today was the 3rd or 4th time in the past couple of weeks that I had to put a sleep 15 in an installatiion or rc.sysinit script because by the time I wanted to access my disk the controller or disk just wasn't awake yet.
Waiting a limited amount of time resulted in perfectly being able to access the disk. And no this has nothing to do with old and slow hardware, it happened with different SAS and SATA controllers also, not just with an external USB disk alone.
