Reliability of USB-based filesystems? Lack thereof?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>
| 
| On Wed, Nov 05, 2008 at 01:49:54PM -0500, Christopher Browne wrote:

| > 1.  Frequently, I run out of disk space on the device, even though
| > there's certainly plenty of room left.

| Remember that FAT16 filesystems (used on cards 2GB and under normally)
| has a limited number of directory entries in the root dir.

| So that's a filesystem design limitation.

FAT16 also supports a fixed number of clusters (64k == 2^16).  So on a
2GB card (somewhat less than 2 ^ 31 bytes), each cluster would be
2 ^ 14 bytes == 32KiB.  So there can be a terrible waste of space (up to
32k per file; often approached with small files).

I doubt that this is your problem, but I thought I'd mention it.

| FAT32 does not have this limitation, but SD card spec only says to use
| FAT32 for SDHC cards (which is normally 4GB+ cards).

Why the heck does the spec talk about the file system level?  None of
its business I'd say.

Chris: have you tried EXT2 (I think that EXT3's journalling is a Bad
Thing for flash)?
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