Re: o_sync in vfat driver

[Kyle Moffett]

On Feb 28, 2006, at 17:38:55, Pavel Machek wrote:
> I have seen flash disk dead in 5 minutes, even without o-sync.  
> Those devices are often crap. (I copied tar file to flash by cat  
> foo.tar > /dev/sda. That was apparently enough to kill that flash.  
> Label "Yahoo" should have warned me).

Sometimes a flash device can have a temporary error condition that is  
solved by rewriting the data.  (I've seen it triggered by buggy USB  
hubs that don't provide the rated power).  It seems that a number of  
flash drives have internal checks, and when those trigger it reports  
a bad sector (even if it isn't permanently bad).  My 1GB flashdrive  
failed in that way, and I was able to fix the error by erasing with  
"dd if=/dev/full of=/dev/usbkey" and reformatting.  After the error  
occurred I started md5summing every file I put on the drive, but I've  
been using it for a month now and not a single checksum has miscomputed.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett
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