[Arm-dev] Errors on dd to hard drive

I am trying to put the CubieTruck image on a hard drive.

With the Cubies, you put only the uboot on the SD card, and all your 
partitions on the sata HD.  The system boots up nicely to the HD. No 
special fstab needed.

So I picked up a 2.5" HD on ebay and connected it via a USB/sata 
adapter.  I used the regular dd command:

xzcat CentOS-Userland-7-armv7hl-Minimal-1611-CubieTruck.img.xz | sudo dd 
of=/dev/sdb bs=4M; sync

But after quite some time, it is still going.  So I checked 
/var/log/messages on my notebook where I am doing the copy and see:

Dec 19 12:53:13 lx120e kernel: Buffer I/O error on dev sdb, logical 
block 568827, lost async page write
Dec 19 12:58:20 lx120e kernel: buffer_io_error: 15967 callbacks suppressed
Dec 19 12:58:20 lx120e kernel: Buffer I/O error on dev sdb, logical 
block 585255, lost async page write
Dec 19 12:58:20 lx120e kernel: Buffer I/O error on dev sdb, logical 
block 585256, lost async page write
Dec 19 12:58:20 lx120e kernel: Buffer I/O error on dev sdb, logical 
block 585257, lost async page write
Dec 19 12:58:20 lx120e kernel: Buffer I/O error on dev sdb, logical 
block 585258, lost async page write
Dec 19 12:58:20 lx120e kernel: Buffer I/O error on dev sdb, logical 
block 585259, lost async page write
Dec 19 12:58:20 lx120e kernel: Buffer I/O error on dev sdb, logical 
block 585260, lost async page write
Dec 19 12:58:20 lx120e kernel: Buffer I/O error on dev sdb, logical 
block 585261, lost async page write
Dec 19 12:58:20 lx120e kernel: Buffer I/O error on dev sdb, logical 
block 585262, lost async page write
Dec 19 12:58:20 lx120e kernel: Buffer I/O error on dev sdb, logical 
block 585263, lost async page write
Dec 19 12:58:20 lx120e kernel: Buffer I/O error on dev sdb, logical 
block 585264, lost async page write
Dec 19 12:59:23 lx120e dnsmasq-dhcp[969]: DHCPREQUEST(virbr0) 
192.168.122.138 52:54:00:90:58:e7
Dec 19 12:59:23 lx120e dnsmasq-dhcp[969]: DHCPACK(virbr0) 
192.168.122.138 52:54:00:90:58:e7

Is this I/O error a problem with the HD?  Or does this HD require some 
other blocksize?

thank you

Bob