Reliability of USB-based filesystems? Lack thereof?

[Eric Battersby]

On Wed, 5 Nov 2008, William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:

> 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.

Christopher, what brands of SD cards and memory sticks
are you using?
Have you had reliable success with any USB hardware,
including hard drives?
I have used Lexar SD cards (256MB to 2GB) and also a memory
stick built into my 2GB MPIO MP3 player, without any problems
for large files.

Have you tried:
- alternate cables?
- alternate OSes (eg: from a Linux live CD)?
- a USB hub with it's own power supply?
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