USB drive causing fault on N66R?

[bbunge]

Three times in the past couple of weeks I've had my N66R lock up. I was running the latest Merlin firmware until the second lockup when I switched to the John fork and the lock up happened on it, too. I went to the latest Asus firmware and had to use the recovery tool to get the router to work. Tonight I noticed the System Log flooded with "Jan 27 20:19:44 kernel: scsi 0:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to dead device" messages. My research pointed to a bad USB drive which in my case is a 1 TB external USB 2 device formatted to NTFS. I have turned off all services that use the drive and safely removed it. A router reboot reveals no more of the above error messages.
Could a bad USB drive cause so many error messages that the router locks up? If so is there a way to prevent this from happening? Would an EXT3 FS be better? It it is not convienient to have this happen when one is 1000 miles away from home!

 

[bbunge]

Well, another Seagate hard drive bytes the dust! Installed a WD drive in the USB enclosure formated with EXT3 and all seems to be running smoothly. Also added a flash drive to store traffic logs. Still looking for advice on the kernel error...