On Friday 18 March 2011, Tim Soderstrom wrote: > > > > However, after some amount of time, the errors occur below, is this USB > > stick failing? Since it has no SMART, is there any other way to verify > > the 'health' of a USB stick? > > What prompted you to go with XFS over, say, ext2? The journal will generally > cause quite a bit more writes onto your USB device. I use ext2 on my CF card > in my NAS for that reason (the spinning media is on XFS of course). I know > that's not an answer to your problem but thought I would add it as a suggestion :) Using ext2 on flash media instead of ext3 or other file systems is recommended a lot, but the situation is actually much more complex. In https://lwn.net/Articles/428584/, I explain how these things work under the cover. For a drive that can only have very few erase blocks open, using a journaled file system will always mean thrashing, but for drives with more open erase blocks, it's probably better to use a journal than not. I still need to do simulations to figure out how this exactly ends up on various file systems, and I had not considered XFS so far. Getting back to the rogiinal question, I'd recommend testing the stick by doing raw accesses instead of a file system. A simple dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/zero iflag=direct bs=4M will read the entire stick and report any errors. The corresponding dd of=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX oflag=direct bs=4M writes the entire stick. Some media won't report errors on write, though, so this might not help you at all. I'm also interested in results from flashbench (git://git.linaro.org/people/arnd/flashbench.git, e.g. like http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/flashbench-results/2011-March/000039.html) That might help explain how the stick failed. Arnd Arnd -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-usb" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
