Resets while ripping

Hi.  I would like to understand something I have seen with each of my 2
optical drives.  I generally run cdparanoia like this:

cdparanoia -w 1- - | flac -s -o album.flac --cuesheet=album.flac.cue -;

i. e. I create 1 huge audio file from the entire disc, rather than rip 1
track at a time.  I do that because I don't like the mechanical strain
on the drive from repeated track scanning.

When I start the above command both drives seem to start at their
maximum speed setting, with quite a bit of noise that sounds like it
comes from an internal fan (?), and ripping proceeds apace.  But then
somewhere in the middle, it just stops.  There are no error messages
from cdparanoia or indeed any output at all - the progress bar is just
frozen.  After some time it resumes where it left off, but much slower,
apparently at 2x or so, and then it finishes without any further signs
of trouble.  The only indication aything is wrong is in the syslog:

kernel: [20166.224017] usb 1-5: reset high-speed USB device number 4
using ehci_hcd

The place into the disc where the freeze happens and its duration seem
to be completely unpredictable - sometimes it happens in the first few
sectors, sometimes close to the end.  It pretty much always happens with
the USB drive but only sometimes with the SATA drive.  The rest of the
system is normal while all this is happening, I can work on other
things.

The drives are:

ASUS external USB 24x

Plextor PX-850SA internal SATA 52x

-- 
Ian Zimmerman
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