2.6.38: XFS/USB/HW issue, or failing USB stick?

[Justin Piszcz]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2011, Tim Soderstrom wrote:

>
> On Mar 18, 2011, at 10:08 AM, Justin Piszcz wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I can write to just about the entire USB stick, with no errors:
>>
>> atom:~# df -h
>> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
>> /dev/sda2             5.8G  1.5G  4.3G  26% /
>> tmpfs                 2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /lib/init/rw
>> udev                   10M  140K  9.9M   2% /dev
>> tmpfs                 2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
>> atom:~# cd /
>> atom:/# ls
>> bin   cdrom  etc   lib    media  nfs  proc  sbin     srv  tmp  var
>> boot  dev    home  lib64  mnt    opt  root  selinux  sys  usr
>> atom:/# dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=1M count=4000
>> 4000+0 records in
>> 4000+0 records out
>> 4194304000 bytes (4.2 GB) copied, 135.536 s, 30.9 MB/s
>> atom:/# df -h
>> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
>> /dev/sda2             5.8G  5.4G  350M  95% /
>> tmpfs                 2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /lib/init/rw
>> udev                   10M  140K  9.9M   2% /dev
>> tmpfs                 2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
>> atom:/# rm bigfile
>>
>> However, after some amount of time, the errors occur below, is this USB
>> stick failing?  Since it has no SMART, is there any other way to verify
>> the 'health' of a USB stick?
>
> What prompted you to go with XFS over, say, ext2? The journal will generally cause quite a bit more writes onto your USB device. I use ext2 on my CF card in my NAS for that reason (the spinning media is on XFS of course). I know that's not an answer to your problem but thought I would add it as a suggestion :)
>

Hi,

Just habit I suppose.. (XFS).  Looks like EXT2 is the correct solution here,
or ext4 w/nojournal (if Google's patch is in the kernel).  I have to read
the lwn.net article though.

Justin