• Re: [gentoo-user] problem formatting new 256 GB USB stick

    From Stroller@21:1/5 to All on Mon Feb 17 17:50:11 2025
    On 15 Feb 2025, at 07:41, Philip Webb <purslow@ca.inter.net> wrote:
    ...
    Has anyone else encountered this ? Does anyone have suggestions ?

    Create multiple large files on your desktop PC. You could use movie files if you have a small number of large enough files handy. I would prefer 5 files of about 45GB, and I would create them using `for i in {1..5} ; do dd if=/dev/random of=random$i ;
    done` and a file size specifier to dd.

    md5sum the files, copy them to the drive and md5sum the copies. Do the md5sums match up?

    I think there's a good chance they won't.

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  • From Frank Steinmetzger@21:1/5 to All on Tue Feb 18 00:20:02 2025
    Am Mon, Feb 17, 2025 at 04:38:22PM +0000 schrieb Stroller:


    On 15 Feb 2025, at 07:41, Philip Webb <purslow@ca.inter.net> wrote:
    ...
    Has anyone else encountered this ? Does anyone have suggestions ?

    Create multiple large files on your desktop PC. You could use movie files if you have a small number of large enough files handy. I would prefer 5 files of about 45GB, and I would create them using `for i in {1..5} ; do dd if=/dev/random of=random$i ;
    done` and a file size specifier to dd.

    md5sum the files, copy them to the drive and md5sum the copies. Do the md5sums match up?

    Methinks it should be enough to create one file of, say, 1 GB and copy that over with a new name each time until the drive is full. All files should return the same md5. This will also save you from writing dozens of GB to
    your main storage because you need its md5 beforehand (unless you have a
    big enough ramdisk).

    NUM=1
    while cp -v /path/to/source /path/to/stick/file$NUM; do NUM=$((NUM + 1))

    When the drive is full, cp fails and the loop should end.

    Or use a flash test program as was mentioned in a recent other post. Either way, going from the discussion so far, I would not trust those sticks until fully written to and read back. There are basically three tiers of Flash memory quality: the best goes into SSDs, the second-best goes into Memory cards or emmc (IIRC) and the “garbage” goes into USB sticks.

    The computer store might be OK, but they have no control over what they get sent. There was a recrent scandal here in Germany about allegedly new
    Seagate HDDs being actually used drives from Chia farms whose SMART values have been reset. This only came to light because Seagate uses another set of internal diagnostic data that was not reset and showed several thousand
    hours of power-on-time. Several big retailers were affected because the problem was with the distributor.

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  • From Philip Webb@21:1/5 to All on Sat Feb 15 08:50:01 2025
    Recently, I bought 2 new Kingston Exodia 256 GB USB sticks
    from Canada Computers, the store in Toronto I've used for 25 yr .
    With many previous new USB sticks of sizes <= 128 GB
    & which came with a VFat filesystem,
    I simply repartitioned them using Fdisk, which created a Linux partition
    & then used 'mke2fs' to format them with an Ext2 filesystem.
    This time, something has gone wrong :

    root:538 ~> mke2fs /dev/sdb1
    mke2fs 1.47.0 (5-Feb-2023)
    Creating filesystem with 60567296 4k blocks and 15147008 inodes
    Filesystem UUID: 80c2f275-ed6b-4ef5-b785-b53bd225ca9e
    Superblock backups stored on blocks: 32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912,
    819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000,
    23887872
    Allocating group tables: done
    Writing inode tables: done
    Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information:
    mke2fs: Input/output error while writing out and closing file system

    I tried repartitioning the stick into 2 x 128 GB partitions,
    in case it was the sheer size which was the problem, but got the same result. The error occured with both sticks, so it doesn't seem to be bad hardware.
    It took 10 h 40 m to process the 256 GB part'n on my 2023 desktop machine, so trying suggestions cb a rather long-drawn-out affair (smile).

    Has anyone else encountered this ? Does anyone have suggestions ?

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