In message <200412311910.iBVJADxu005783@flam.gado>, "Denis Lagno" writes:
>Hi,
>
>I use USB drives sometimes.  Flashes work fine.
>But recently I've got external USB case for hard drive.
>It turns on the drive only after plugging USB cable in.
>And 2-3 seconds are needed to spin the drive on.
>And it often happens that kernel recognizes only umass and
>scsibus at umass, but not sd itself.
>So I need to plug it off and on again in hope of finding
>myself more fortunate.
>Can it be because of some too restrictive timeouts in the kernel?
>

At least on -current, I don't think that's it.  I just bought an 
external ATA case, too, and it takes about 30 seconds from when I turn 
it on to when I see the console messages showing the attachment.  

What version of NetBSD are you running?  If it's 2.0 and you're hitting 
the buffer memory issue, there should be a message; I don't think that 
that message existed in 1.6.x.  (I use fvdl's patch, so I don't see the 
problem in any event.)

		--Prof. Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb