# usb flash disk question

## queen

My brother got a 8gb usb flash disk ( iCreate Technologies Corp.) which was supposed to be usb2.0. Unfortunately it's not. On the box it's written speed 800kbyte/s (write) and 970kbyte/s (read). I checked with hdparm -tT /dev/sda1 and got

```
/dev/sda1:

 Timing cached reads:   2572 MB in  2.00 seconds = 1283.35 MB/sec

 Timing buffered disk reads:    4 MB in  4.29 seconds = 954.27 kB/sec
```

He got all the money back and remained with the device. I would like to tweak it, and do the best that can be done with this device. What can be done? hdparm works with ide ata devices. Format to other filesystem can help? 

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

----------

## NeddySeagoon

queen,

I can't believe that anyone makes a 8GB USB flash stick.

The speeds you quote tie in with USB 1.1 operation for sure.

Can you post your /proc/bus/usb/devices (all of it) while the device is connected please.

Edit Hmm .. http://411me.blogspot.com/  they may not even be 8Gb devices

----------

## queen

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> queen,
> 
> I can't believe that anyone makes a 8GB USB flash stick.
> 
> The speeds you quote tie in with USB 1.1 operation for sure.
> ...

 

Here is 

```
cat /proc/bus/usb/devices

T:  Bus=04 Lev=00 Prnt=00 Port=00 Cnt=00 Dev#=  1 Spd=480 MxCh= 6

B:  Alloc=  0/800 us ( 0%), #Int=  0, #Iso=  0

D:  Ver= 2.00 Cls=09(hub  ) Sub=00 Prot=01 MxPS=64 #Cfgs=  1

P:  Vendor=0000 ProdID=0000 Rev= 2.06

S:  Manufacturer=Linux 2.6.15-gentoo-r1 ehci_hcd

S:  Product=EHCI Host Controller

S:  SerialNumber=0000:00:1d.7

C:* #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=c0 MxPwr=  0mA

I:  If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=09(hub  ) Sub=00 Prot=00 Driver=hub

E:  Ad=81(I) Atr=03(Int.) MxPS=   2 Ivl=256ms

T:  Bus=03 Lev=00 Prnt=00 Port=00 Cnt=00 Dev#=  1 Spd=12  MxCh= 2

B:  Alloc=  0/900 us ( 0%), #Int=  0, #Iso=  0

D:  Ver= 1.10 Cls=09(hub  ) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS=64 #Cfgs=  1

P:  Vendor=0000 ProdID=0000 Rev= 2.06

S:  Manufacturer=Linux 2.6.15-gentoo-r1 uhci_hcd

S:  Product=UHCI Host Controller

S:  SerialNumber=0000:00:1d.2

C:* #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=c0 MxPwr=  0mA

I:  If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=09(hub  ) Sub=00 Prot=00 Driver=hub

E:  Ad=81(I) Atr=03(Int.) MxPS=   2 Ivl=255ms

T:  Bus=03 Lev=01 Prnt=01 Port=00 Cnt=01 Dev#=  5 Spd=12  MxCh= 0

D:  Ver= 1.10 Cls=00(>ifc ) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS= 8 #Cfgs=  1

P:  Vendor=1043 ProdID=8006 Rev= 1.00

S:  Manufacturer=Generic

S:  Product=Flash Disk

S:  SerialNumber=200607132229

C:* #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=80 MxPwr=100mA

I:  If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 2 Cls=08(stor.) Sub=06 Prot=50 Driver=usb-storage

E:  Ad=81(I) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS=  64 Ivl=0ms

E:  Ad=02(O) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS=  64 Ivl=0ms

T:  Bus=02 Lev=00 Prnt=00 Port=00 Cnt=00 Dev#=  1 Spd=12  MxCh= 2

B:  Alloc=  0/900 us ( 0%), #Int=  0, #Iso=  0

D:  Ver= 1.10 Cls=09(hub  ) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS=64 #Cfgs=  1

P:  Vendor=0000 ProdID=0000 Rev= 2.06

S:  Manufacturer=Linux 2.6.15-gentoo-r1 uhci_hcd

S:  Product=UHCI Host Controller

S:  SerialNumber=0000:00:1d.1

C:* #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=c0 MxPwr=  0mA

I:  If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=09(hub  ) Sub=00 Prot=00 Driver=hub

E:  Ad=81(I) Atr=03(Int.) MxPS=   2 Ivl=255ms

T:  Bus=01 Lev=00 Prnt=00 Port=00 Cnt=00 Dev#=  1 Spd=12  MxCh= 2

B:  Alloc= 93/900 us (10%), #Int=  1, #Iso=  0

D:  Ver= 1.10 Cls=09(hub  ) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS=64 #Cfgs=  1

P:  Vendor=0000 ProdID=0000 Rev= 2.06

S:  Manufacturer=Linux 2.6.15-gentoo-r1 uhci_hcd

S:  Product=UHCI Host Controller

S:  SerialNumber=0000:00:1d.0

C:* #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=c0 MxPwr=  0mA

I:  If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=09(hub  ) Sub=00 Prot=00 Driver=hub

E:  Ad=81(I) Atr=03(Int.) MxPS=   2 Ivl=255ms

T:  Bus=01 Lev=01 Prnt=01 Port=00 Cnt=01 Dev#=  4 Spd=1.5 MxCh= 0

D:  Ver= 2.00 Cls=00(>ifc ) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS= 8 #Cfgs=  1

P:  Vendor=04b3 ProdID=310b Rev= 1.60

C:* #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=a0 MxPwr=100mA

I:  If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=03(HID  ) Sub=01 Prot=02 Driver=usbhid

E:  Ad=81(I) Atr=03(Int.) MxPS=   4 Ivl=10ms

```

Besides the usb pendrive i have an ibm mouse connected. The volume is 8gb. I checked with df -m.

Here is my 

```
lsusb

Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

Bus 003 Device 005: ID 1043:8006 iCreate Technologies Corp.

Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

Bus 001 Device 004: ID 04b3:310b IBM Corp.

Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

```

Here is the picture of the device

http://sfinc.en.alibaba.com/product/50125354/50583517/USB_Flash_Drives/8GB_Leather_USB_Flash_Drive.html

I checked iCreate Technologies Corp on the web: here is their link: 

http://www.icreate.com.tw/e/icreate_e.htm

I know that this whole bussiness is fishy. He got the money very fast from the seller (in hong kong from ebay). Lucky they didn't asked to send back the device, because then it would have cost him the delivery back. I just try to do the best i can with this device if it's worth the efforts.

----------

## NeddySeagoon

queen,

Its clearly a fast USB 1.1 device, from

```
T:  Bus=03 Lev=01 Prnt=01 Port=00 Cnt=01 Dev#=  5 Spd=12  MxCh= 0 
```

This page says (from the Vendor and Device IDs 

```
1043  iCreate Technologies Corp.

   8006  Flash Disk 32 MB
```

 If you google 

```
1043 +8006 +usb
```

you will find other pages suggesting its actually 64Mb or 128Mb.

Some vendors don't change their device IDs like they should. Theres lots on this Vendor and Device ID being used as the basis of forgeries too.

Its easy enough to fake the partition table (if it has one) and a FAT32 filesystem so it looks any size you like on whatever device size you happen to have. Such a filesystem won't be self consistant and will very soon break with use.

```
fdisk -l 
```

may report the true size of the device.

----------

## queen

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> queen,
> 
> Its clearly a fast USB 1.1 device, from
> 
> ```
> ...

 

Thank you very much for the link. So far i managed to copy 1.9gb. But i haven't cheked the integrity of the files. I know that my brother tried before to copy a bunch of pictures. Up to 700mb he copied and it was ok. He managed to copy the same folder few more times, but the files were corrupted. 

Here is 

```
 fdisk -l 

Disk /dev/sda: 8388 MB, 8388608512 bytes

8 heads, 32 sectors/track, 64000 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 256 * 512 = 131072 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System

/dev/sda1   *           1       63999     8191856    b  W95 FAT32

```

can you tell me  what is w95 field in the system category?

Out of curiosity is there a way to check if it has a partition table at all?

----------

## jure1873

 *queen wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Here is 
> 
> ```
> ...

 

w95 fat32 is the normal filesystem used by windows (before ntfs)

if you have sda1 then it has a partition table because the usb disks that don't have partition tables are only sda, without the 1 that means 1st partition on that device. If there is something wrong with the partition table fdisk -l usually reports it (for example if the usb disk is 128mb but they write that is a bigger than that in the partition table)

----------

## queen

 *jure1873 wrote:*   

>  *queen wrote:*   
> 
> Here is 
> 
> ```
> ...

 

ok, thanks. So, it looks like it's 8gb after all.

----------

## NeddySeagoon

queen,

The device certainly has a valid partition table

```
fdisk -l
```

does sanity checks and interprets it.

Thats not to say it relates to the actual size of the device

A partition type of 0xb is Windows FAT32, which is expanded in the System field.

fdisk will show you a list. 

This information

```
Disk /dev/sda: 8388 MB, 8388608512 bytes

8 heads, 32 sectors/track, 64000 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 256 * 512 = 131072 bytes
```

comes from the identify command. Its not so easy to fake as the filesystem and partiton table because its written to read only space. the heads, cylinders and sectors are an way to map the drive into the old C/H/S addressing mechanism. They have no phyical reality. 

My pendrive looks like a floppy (no partition table)

```
 fdisk -l /dev/pendrive

Note: sector size is 4096 (not 512)

Disk /dev/pendrive: 2074 MB, 2074603520 bytes

64 heads, 62 sectors/track, 127 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 3968 * 4096 = 16252928 bytes

This doesn't look like a partition table

Probably you selected the wrong device.

        Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System

/dev/pendrive1   ?      487911      954609  3112468940   68  Unknown
```

If your device is not actually 8Gb, then the read only data has been faked too.

Its possible, just more difficult. I would have expected a real 8Gb flash drive to be made with flash chips that do not support a 512b sector size.

Thats the minimum you can write. Your device claims a 512 bye sector.

Having tried the obvious, the only way to be sure is to dismantle the device and read the numbers off of the ICs inside. 

Issue the sync command every now and again - that forces cached write data to be flushed to the devices, including your pen drive.

The prompt will not return until the sync is complete, which may be some time. Say, in excess of 20 min, if there is 1Gb in dirty buffers.

----------

## queen

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> queen,
> 
> The device certainly has a valid partition table
> 
> ```
> ...

 

I read today on usb that there is a program in windows that can read the internal information without dismantling it. Forgot the name and now i can't find that link anymore. If you know the name of the program i will be glad to know. 

As for the sync command, what would be the exact syntax? How can i ensure it syncs the usb device and not something else. I didn't see in the manual any option sync device

----------

## jure1873

It's just sync and there is nothing wrong is you sync everything.

I think that windows program does the same thing as fdisk. You could try a format with bad block checking so you can see if you can use all the 8gb.

----------

## NeddySeagoon

queen,

I'm still very skeptical of the device being 8Gb.

Try 

```
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null
```

to read the entire device. Post the numbers when dd completes

8Gb at 1Mb/sec (USB 1.1 on a good day) is 8000 seconds. It may well take more than 2 hours.

This is not foolproof either. If the device contains (say) 32Mb of memory, it could be arranged to read the same 32Mb over and over.

The same would happen with writes too.

The sync command writes all cached write date to all devices. If you had 1Gb of RAM and it was full of data to be written to a USB 1 device, it would take 1000 seconds (approx) for the sync to work.

Your Windows program will display the output of the Identify command, just as fdisk does. If thats been faked, then the only way to see what you have is to inspect the hardware.

----------

## queen

Here is the output of the command you told me to run:

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/null

16383712+0 records in

16383712+0 records out

8388460544 bytes (8.4 GB) copied, 8168.47 seconds, 1.0 MB/s

What do you say about it?

It took 2:30 hours. Also i want to mention that my brother formated it already once and he got 8gb after formatting. I searched on google and found out that other faked devices which claimed for 4gb after formatting became few hundreds of mb. 

I managed to copy 3 films on it and they seemed ok. The 4th film (which is a copy of one mentioned before), appeared to be corrupted. mplayer didn't launched it. I didn't try to copy more than this. 

What should be the speed of flash drive usb 1.1? presuming it is still flash drive.

----------

## NeddySeagoon

queen,

Well, that dd command read 8Gb from the device.

USB 1.1 has a maximum speed of 12 Mbits/second, however, there is some overhead when you use it fro read data. Your 1.0MB/s that dd achieved (and I was using for mental aritmentic) is probably as good as it gets.

I don't understand why anyone would make such a thing as an 8Gb USB 1.1 FLASH stick. The USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 controllers are the same price and USB 2.0 will fall back to USB 1.1 if required. 

Having looked at the USB Flash Disk Controller Data Sheets on the iCreate website, things still don't add up.

1. The largest USB 1.1 controller advertised can only be used for drives of up to 2Gb.

2. To get 8Gb, you must use the USB 2.0 FLASH memory controller.

It follows that either a) the device really is USB 2.0 capable, or b) its not 8.0Gb.

I suppose the Vendor and Product IDs could be bogus too.

Looking at your /proc/bus/usb/devices shows that the flash disk is on a UHCI root hub on its own.

When I plug my USB 2.0 pendrive into a USB 1.1 root hub, it reports itself as a USB 1.1 device and falls back. If you have a mix of USB capabilities, sharing forces a lowest standard wins.

```
emerge usbview
```

remove all the other USB devices you have and try the the pendrive in each USB port in turn, as the only USB device connected. rerun usbview each time - does the FLASH ever appear on the EHCI controller ?

If so - its operating as USB 2.0

Its possible that not all your USB ports are USB 2.0 capable.

----------

## queen

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> queen,
> 
> Well, that dd command read 8Gb from the device.
> 
> USB 1.1 has a maximum speed of 12 Mbits/second, however, there is some overhead when you use it fro read data. Your 1.0MB/s that dd achieved (and I was using for mental aritmentic) is probably as good as it gets.
> ...

 

Indeed i noticed that small overhead. But I thought that it's not important. 

I installed usbview and put the flash disk inside. They were all uhci controller. After that i checked a 4gb microdive and it showed ehci controller. My laptop doesn't have mixed usb devices. They are all usb2. 

According to your theory, since it's usb 1.1 and uhci controller then it should hold maximum 2gb. Right now i have on this device 2251mb. I will try to copy more and see what happens. So far only one file is corrupted. (700mb). Something still doesn't add up. ;-(

I suspect that the vendor id is fake, because with this id there are many companies. 

Here is my lspci output (snipped)

00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)

00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)

00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)

00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 03)

----------

## NeddySeagoon

queen,

You must be careful nor to mix USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 devices on the sme root hub.

No damage will result but all the devices on that root hub will operate at USB 1.1 speeds.

The preamble in the data sheets gives the maximum memory that the controller chips can address.

For the USB 1.1 devices, thats 2Gb.  As you say, it doesn't hang together yet.

----------

## Gentree

dont put too much weight on the IDs or the "manufacturer" text that linux gives them. The first can be false and the second are often inaccurate.

Could it be that it is a usb2 controller that is running a bit out of spec. that is forcing the hub to degrade the connection?

 :Cool: 

----------

## NeddySeagoon

Gentree,

Hmmm   a 'Genuine Reject'   Thats a possibility.

Its been done with RAM and CPUs, why not FLASH memory controllers too.

----------

## queen

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> queen,
> 
> You must be careful nor to mix USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 devices on the sme root hub.
> 
> No damage will result but all the devices on that root hub will operate at USB 1.1 speeds.
> ...

 

Looks like the pen drive, can copy more than 2gb, but files get corrupted. until 1.5gb the files are ok. 

I wonder if i format reiserfs if files will be ok.

 I have few more questions: if it's capable to store 2gb how come it copies more than that? 

about the same root hub, how can i know if the devices are on the same root hub?

----------

## queen

 *Gentree wrote:*   

> dont put too much weight on the IDs or the "manufacturer" text that linux gives them. The first can be false and the second are often inaccurate.
> 
> Could it be that it is a usb2 controller that is running a bit out of spec. that is forcing the hub to degrade the connection?
> 
> 

 

 I suspected the id manufacturer is fake. Linux says icreate technology (from taiwan), while the image of the pen drive shows me it's other chinese company. See the links above.

----------

## NeddySeagoon

queen,

The easy one first, usbview shows which devices are on which root hub by the indents.

Don't put reiserfs or any other journalled filesystem on FLASH memory. The writes to the journal will kill the FLASH, even with wear levlling. Writing twice will also slow it down.  Use FAT32 or ext2.

All of the iCreate USB FLASH controllers had bad sector mamanement too, which means the device will appear to get smaller as bad sectors appear. That means that files should not become corrupt, unless there is an element of address wrapping boing on. That is the same phyisical memory location appears at several addressis in the device. This is easy to arrange if addresses are not fully decoded. For example, 1Gb requires 30 address bits. The same memory could then appear to start at 2G, 3Gb and so on, for a total of 8x. This was a common way of saving hardware in the early days of the home computer - by not doing full address decoding.

To check for this, read the boot sector with dd and compare it with the data found at 32Mb, 64Mb 128Mb ... down the memory

If you find another identical sector, its probably the same physical storage locations. Having found a repeat, change the data in one palce, if it changes in both, thats positive proof. In 8Gb the chance of finding 2 idnetical sectors by chance is very small. Calculating it is left as an exercise for the reader.

----------

## Gentree

While you're thinking about flash wear-out make sure you system mounts any fat32 on flash without sync. 

linux sync of fat32 (after 2.6.11 IIRC) will hammer the hell out of the FAT

 :Cool: 

----------

## queen

 *Gentree wrote:*   

> While you're thinking about flash wear-out make sure you system mounts any fat32 on flash without sync. 
> 
> linux sync of fat32 (after 2.6.11 IIRC) will hammer the hell out of the FAT
> 
> 

 

Looks like it mounted this fat32 flash. i copied stuff on it. is there other way to check it? i didn't performed sync with this device. BTW, i did 

```
dosfsck -a -f -v -V /dev/sda1
```

. First time there were errors, but 2nd run of the same command, didn't gave any errors.  Still, a damaged file which was copy of file1 didn't worked. file1 worked as before.

----------

## Gentree

sorry , probably throwing you too much at once , some of this can be confusing.

a: sync as a command will flush all buffers system wide , any user can. Do this before any fsck or other file operations to be sure it is all written . Above all expect to completely shag your fs and need to reformat if you pull out a usb device before sync has happened. ie do the command to be sure.

b: sync as an option to mount command (see man mount ) . The way this is done on recent kernels for fat32 is seriously flawed , write times can de upto 10x longer than without sync because it does a rediculous ammount of flushing. This can wear out cheap devices , you may own one!

Once you have mounted the usb device (or it is automounted ??) type mount and see what it tells you about /dev/sda? 

hope then clarifies a bit. sorry.

 :Cool: 

```
/dev/sda1 on /mnt/usb1 type vfat (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,shortname=winnt)
```

That is mine , determined by mount . You may have hal pmount ... or similar if your "WM" does automounting. That's what you need to watch.

----------

## queen

 *Gentree wrote:*   

> sorry , probably throwing you too much at once , some of this can be confusing.
> 
> a: sync as a command will flush all buffers system wide , any user can. Do this before any fsck or other file operations to be sure it is all written . Above all expect to completely shag your fs and need to reformat if you pull out a usb device before sync has happened. ie do the command to be sure.
> 
> b: sync as an option to mount command (see man mount ) . The way this is done on recent kernels for fat32 is seriously flawed , write times can de upto 10x longer than without sync because it does a rediculous ammount of flushing. This can wear out cheap devices , you may own one!
> ...

 

I don't have automount. I always mount manually usb devices. As for the sync, i already checked the format. But i don't mind to format it again. this device was already formated by my brother as fat32. I will try as fat32 and try ntfs too. Thanks for the tip of sync in mount command. I never used this flag. I sure get a good lesson in usb stuff from you and Neddy.   :Very Happy: 

My kernel is 2.6.15-r1. Which kernels you meant? 2.6.17 versions?

I know the usb is a cheap one. The seller at ebay claimed it's usb2. only for this he deserves to be declared as fraud.

----------

## Gentree

as I said I think the kernel issue applies to all >2.6.11 .

If you want to see the diff just try mounting your fat32 with -osync and do some timings but dont do anything bigger than 100MB or so.

a freind tested this on Suse and saw 45s vs 4m30 with sync on. Most of the diff must be rewriting the FAT n-thousand times! Win2k did the same job in 2m30 , a more balanced sync policy it seems.

As Neddy suggested stick to fat32 or ext2 is best on these devices.

a good way to check your file integrity is to run md5sum on both.

PS.

Dont be too hard on the guy who sold you the device , he did refund and left you the device. That seems honest enough to me. More honest than your bro has the right to expect buying on ebay from someone in Hong Kong !! I'd say he was lucky.

 :Cool: 

----------

## queen

 *Gentree wrote:*   

> as I said I think the kernel issue applies to all >2.6.11 .
> 
> If you want to see the diff just try mounting your fat32 with -osync and do some timings but dont do anything bigger than 100MB or so.
> 
> a freind tested this on Suse and saw 45s vs 4m30 with sync on. Most of the diff must be rewriting the FAT n-thousand times! Win2k did the same job in 2m30 , a more balanced sync policy it seems.
> ...

 

My brother bought the device. He threw it to me, and asked me to check it. The guy from hong kong gave first 20 pound because my brother claimed it's slow. After that he got the rest of the money because he found out that after the first 700mb all the rest of the files were corrupted. The only thing that makes me angry is that the guy declared on the page that it's usb2, while on the box of the device all these speeds are written and they definitely define it as usb1.1

As for format i will use fat32, because i want to use it in windows too.

I checked md5sum. They were different.

----------

## Gentree

looking like it's probably a 2GB usb1,1

if you want to check you could reformat , write about 1.8G worth of films then a smaller file and do the md5sum on the smaller one.

I suspect you have 2GB usable which is more than enough to get you bored at 1.1 speeds. If no-one makes 8GB usb1.1 it's because they would be useless.

These devices make good company gifts but I would not want more than 128K of usb1.1

still, interesting run around trying to suss what is was. 

I think we all leart a bit.   :Cool: 

----------

## queen

 *Gentree wrote:*   

> looking like it's probably a 2GB usb1,1
> 
> if you want to check you could reformat , write about 1.8G worth of films then a smaller file and do the md5sum on the smaller one.
> 
> I suspect you have 2GB usable which is more than enough to get you bored at 1.1 speeds. If no-one makes 8GB usb1.1 it's because they would be useless.
> ...

 

Yes, we learned.   :Very Happy: 

And now for the results. I formated it as fat32 and when i put few films, it turned out that 1.7gb was usable. I copied more than that but it wrote files of 0000.00 and a directory with the name of the film in which there were more 0000.000 files + the film (which was damaged of course).

I couldn't remove that directory because i got error "cannot lstat. I/O error"

So then i decided to format it as ext2. this time i mounted it with -osync flag. When i copied the  first film it continued to copy more than 700mb. It reached 1.1gb and i stopped it. this means it doesn't flash buffers? This is the reason why it allows to write so much (even though that the file isn't usable)?

3rd time i formatted again as fat32 and copied around 1.7 which was usable. I copied some more gz files (10-15mb). Gunzip took quite long time in my opinion. tar -xvf file.tar extracted some of the files, but i got in 2 cases (samba, wxpython extract) errors like this:

```
tar: samba-3.0.22/docs/history: Cannot change ownership to uid 783, gid 783: Operation not permitted

tar: samba-3.0.22/docs: Cannot change ownership to uid 783, gid 783: Operation not permitted

tar: samba-3.0.22: Cannot change ownership to uid 783, gid 783: Operation not permitted

tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

```

A nice suprise, 100mb it copied quite fast.

----------

## Massimo B.

Which filesystem is the best for usb flash drive?

I understand that filesystems without journaling such as ext2 are a better choice for flash.

But I was told in #gentoo.de that UDF is the fileformat for flash and also supports unix attributes. What is the advantage of using UDF instead of ext2?

----------

## queen

 *paoleela wrote:*   

> Which filesystem is the best for usb flash drive?
> 
> I understand that filesystems without journaling such as ext2 are a better choice for flash.
> 
> But I was told in #gentoo.de that UDF is the fileformat for flash and also supports unix attributes. What is the advantage of using UDF instead of ext2?

 

I left mine fat32 because i need it for windows too. And it turned out to be usb 1.1. But as Neddy mentioned it has to be a filesystem without journalling because otherwise it will kill the flash. A friend of mine bought a sandisk cruzer 2gb with titanium and it has file system U3. He is very satisfied. U3 is a kind of udf?

----------

## m_0_r_0_n

Hi,

my usbstick is too slow since the update of the kernel. It takes 5 minutes to copy a 8 MB file to the stick. The admin tool "usbview" displays the following information

/*Data of EHCI Host Controller*/

EHCI Host Controller

Manufacturer: Linux 2.6.18-gentoo-r3 ehci_hcd

Serial Number: 0000:00:1d.7

Speed: 480Mb/s (high)

Number of Ports: 6

Bandwidth allocated: 0 / 800 (0%)

Total number of interrupt requests: 0

Total number of isochronous requests: 0

USB Version:  2.00

Device Class: 09(hub  )

Device Subclass: 00

Device Protocol: 01

Maximum Default Endpoint Size: 64

Number of Configurations: 1

Config Number: 1

	Number of Interfaces: 1

	Attributes: e0

	MaxPower Needed:   0mA

	Interface Number: 0

		Name: hub

		Alternate Number: 0

		Class: 09(hub  ) 

		Sub Class: 0

		Protocol: 0

		Number of Endpoints: 1

			Endpoint Address: 81

			Direction: in

			Attribute: 3

			Type: Int.

			Max Packet Size: 2

			Interval: 256ms

/* Data of my 8 GB usbstick */

USB Stick CS-D

Manufacturer: TrekStor GmbH & Co. KG

Serial Number: AA9F1DB41615

Speed: 480Mb/s (high)

USB Version:  2.00

Device Class: 00(>ifc )

Device Subclass: 00

Device Protocol: 00

Maximum Default Endpoint Size: 64

Number of Configurations: 1

Vendor Id: 0451

Product Id: 625f

Revision Number:  2.20

Config Number: 1

	Number of Interfaces: 1

	Attributes: c0

	MaxPower Needed: 100mA

	Interface Number: 0

		Name: usb-storage

		Alternate Number: 0

		Class: 08(stor.) 

		Sub Class: 6

		Protocol: 50

		Number of Endpoints: 2

			Endpoint Address: 01

			Direction: out

			Attribute: 2

			Type: Bulk

			Max Packet Size: 512

			Interval: 125us

			Endpoint Address: 82

			Direction: in

			Attribute: 2

			Type: Bulk

			Max Packet Size: 512

			Interval: 0ms

Any idea how to speed up the writing processes? 

m_0_r_0_n

----------

## queen

 *m_0_r_0_n wrote:*   

> Hi,
> 
> my usbstick is too slow since the update of the kernel. It takes 5 minutes to copy a 8 MB file to the stick. The admin tool "usbview" displays the following information
> 
> /*Data of EHCI Host Controller*/
> ...

 

Looks like something in usb configuration is not correct. Please post the results of 

```
grep -i usb /usr/src/linux/.config
```

 and 

```
lspci 
```

----------

