Reliability of USB-based filesystems? Lack thereof?

[Christopher Browne]

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 2:31 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> I have been having *terrible* troubles trying to copy files of any
>> material size (e.g. - such as videos and such) onto USB-based devices,
>> notably USB memory sticks and onto SD cards mounted via USB.

> Remember that FAT16 filesystems (used on cards 2GB and under normally)
> has a limited number of directory entries in the root dir.  Long file
> names (as VFAT does) uses multiple entries per file.  This means you can
> run out if directory entries very quickly, if you place them all in the
> root.  If you create a subdir, you can put all that you want in that
> subdir, since it isn't limited in size and hence the number of entries.

A clarification here:  I did recall there being some limitation
surrounding the root directory, and have created files in
subdirectories, which didn't seem to affect the corruption phenomenon
either positively or negatively.

The case I ran into this week was one where I was trying to copy a sum
total of 5 files to the SD card; in that case, I wouldn't expect the
directory entry issue to be an issue :-).
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