PROBLEM: USB ext3 issues in 2.6

I was running the 2.6.7 kernel and trying to write large amounts of data to a USB 2.0 hard drive formatted as ext3. It would get about halfway through then I'd start getting errors about it being a read-only file system. When I looked at the dmesg output, I noticed there were journaling errors and a message about it remounting read-only.

Unfortunately, to get it to work under a timelimit, I changed two variables at once, so I cannot pinpoint the exact culprit. I went back to the 2.4.26 kernel and also reformatted the USB disk as an ext2 partition. With this combination, the drive worked great and all data was moved to it with one copy and no errors.