Reliability of USB-based filesystems? Lack thereof?

[William O'Higgins Witteman]

On Wed, Nov 05, 2008 at 01:49:54PM -0500, Christopher Browne wrote:
>I have been running into a problem lately which I thought I'd "toss
>over the wall" to see if others have experienced similar...
>
>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.
>
>I copy files over, and there are two tendancies:
>
>1.  Frequently, I run out of disk space on the device, even though
>there's certainly plenty of room left.
>
>2.  After completing copying, I unmount the filesystem (which takes a
>while, due to flushing out updates), and when I remount, the
>filesystem tends to be pretty corrupt, with wacky directory entries
>containing control characters.

I haven't seen #2, but I do see #1 a bit - I get this on both Linux and
Windows when dealing with large files and SD cards - so far no trouble
on USB, but that may just be luck.  Big files tend to move on my SD
cards, and wee ones on the sticks.  I have found no certain cause, but
the "cheap" accusation certainly fits - I have several very low cost
SDHC cards for my Eee, and this is where I have see trouble - that and
pulling things off onto Windows at work.

So, with an n of two and a data quality of "anecdote" we can plot a line
;-)
-- 

yours,

William

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