Working USB-Sticks

Bought an APTIVA brand 4GB jump drive for $7.99 at Office Depot.
Only wants to warm boot.
Works fine once booted though.

Hi guys!

Use both Patriot Exporter 4GB and Patriot Exporter Dash 4GB. Warm boot to Debian only. Works great!

The strange thing is for Patriot Exporter Dash 4GB, does not cold boot after I've built it using Jeff's script. I used USB Image Tool to copy to Patriot Exporter 4GB, and cold boot worked the very first time , and then stopped when I tried to test the cold boot again.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/22/2011 04:08PM by bodhi.

rat Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> PNY 4GB Micro Attache: 7MB/sec
-------------------------------------------------------

rat,

Is this thumb drive?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002PAR0K6/

or this one?
http://www.amazon.com/PNY-Micro-Attache-Flash-P-FD4GBMIC-FS/dp/B001IDYIRO

Thanks.

bodhi Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> or this one?
> http://www.amazon.com/PNY-Micro-Attache-Flash-P-FD
> 4GBMIC-FS/dp/B001IDYIRO

That one. The version that is NOT in a swivel keychain type package. They're surprisingly decent for what one might expect such a small packaging to be capable of... MicroSD cards in USB readers are larger than those and slower! With some careful soldering work, it'd be really easy to wire one of those up internally to the dockstar and hide it inside the case with room to spare. I still use mine as the boot drive for Ubuntu on my netbook.

I tend to have pretty good luck with PNY thumbdrives in general.


bodhi Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hi guys!
>
> Use both Patriot Exporter 4GB and Patriot Exporter
> Dash 4GB. Warm boot to Debian only. Works great!
>
> The strange thing is for Patriot Exporter Dash
> 4GB, does not cold boot after I've built it using
> Jeff's script. I used USB Image Tool to copy to
> Patriot Exporter 4GB, and cold boot worked the
> very first time , and then stopped when I tried to
> test the cold boot again.

I mentioned having problems with a Patriot thumbdrive in an earlier post. (this one: http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,1915,2604#msg-2604 )

By this point, having multiple problems with multiple models of Patriot branded flash drives, I pretty much just tell everyone to avoid them like the plague. They all suck.

They all have developed problems that should never have happened in the first place. They work fine one minute, they stop working that way the next and there's absolutely nothing changed aside from adding files to it. I complained about this on the product page on NewEgg and their official response was that booting from their USB drives is an unsupported feature! It would be an incomplete implementation of the USB spec if that were intentional.

IMHO, Patriot thumbdrives are not worth using at any price. Even free.


If you want something fast and reliable and don't mind paying a little extra for it... I'd grab one of these: http://cgi.ebay.com/SD-SanDisk-4Gb-Memory-Card-Ducati-Edition-USB-Plug-/110638715388

It's what I use in my Dockstar right now. What's not obvious about the SD Plus card is that it has an activity LED hidden behind one of the SD card contact pins if you're wanting visual feedback for when stuff is being written to the card.

rat,

Thanks for the info. Indeed, the Patriot thumb drives are not worth the trouble.

bodhi

Hi,

I've first installed Debian on my Dockstar using a:

0951:1605 Kingston Technology DataTravelerMini (1GB)

It works good but is small and rather sloooow !

I then copied (with rsync) all the stuff to a 2 GB device which is :

0951:1603 Kingston Technology DataTraveler 1GB/2GB Pen Drive (DataTraveler 2.0)

With this one I get weird results :

- If I try to cold-boot (power-reset) my DockStar, it will boot into the on-board rescue system, and a Netconsole shows that uBoot doesn't see any USB storage device connected.

- But then, if I reboot the device using "reboot" from inside the rescue system, then, most of the times, uBoot will now see the USB device and happily boot from it.

Any clue ?

As a side note, several people in this thread talk about making the first partition "active" on the USB drive, i.e. setting its "bootable" flag on using whatever partitioning tool.

This is absolutely irrelevant and has no influence on the way a given device will boot or not in Linux using uBoot. The "bootable" flag only concerns MS-DOS bootloader. uBoot tries to read the kernel from an ext2 partition, then loads it and fires it, it pays absolutely no attention about whether or not the given partition is marked "bootable".

Also, Jeff's suggestion to "restore old behavior" at http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,1915,2330#msg-2330 doesn't help with my non-cold-booting Kingston drive (alas). I could find no reliable solution with this stick so far, I believe the easiest one is "use another stick" ;-)

Swâmi, I think if you review the earlier posts in this thread, you'll find that the situation you describe is a common problem with the higher capacity Kingston thumb drives. Sandisk Cruzers seem to be better with cold boots. Yes, the conventional wisdom is that if a given stick doesn't cold boot, try another brand. Good luck.

In an earlier post I was positive about my Supertalent Pico-C 8 GB I bought in 2008 (fast and always cold booting).

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to apply to newer ones. Two Pico-C 8 GB I bought recently do not reliably boot cold and even not every time I reboot from a running system.

The old, good one identifies itself to lsusb as

Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0000:0000  
Device Descriptor:
  bLength                18
  bDescriptorType         1
  bcdUSB               2.00
  bDeviceClass            0 (Defined at Interface level)
  bDeviceSubClass         0 
  bDeviceProtocol         0 
  bMaxPacketSize0        64
  idVendor           0x0000 
  idProduct          0x0000 
  bcdDevice            0.00
  iManufacturer           1 SMI Corporation
  iProduct                2 USB
  iSerial                 3 AA627084221000000117
  bNumConfigurations      1
  Configuration Descriptor:
    bLength                 9
    bDescriptorType         2
    wTotalLength           32
    bNumInterfaces          1
    bConfigurationValue     1
    iConfiguration          0 
    bmAttributes         0x80
      (Bus Powered)
    MaxPower              500mA
    Interface Descriptor:
      bLength                 9
      bDescriptorType         4
      bInterfaceNumber        0
      bAlternateSetting       0
      bNumEndpoints           2
      bInterfaceClass         8 Mass Storage
      bInterfaceSubClass      6 SCSI
      bInterfaceProtocol     80 Bulk (Zip)
      iInterface              0 
      Endpoint Descriptor:
        bLength                 7
        bDescriptorType         5
        bEndpointAddress     0x81  EP 1 IN
        bmAttributes            2
          Transfer Type            Bulk
          Synch Type               None
          Usage Type               Data
        wMaxPacketSize     0x0200  1x 512 bytes
        bInterval             255
      Endpoint Descriptor:
        bLength                 7
        bDescriptorType         5
        bEndpointAddress     0x02  EP 2 OUT
        bmAttributes            2
          Transfer Type            Bulk
          Synch Type               None
          Usage Type               Data
        wMaxPacketSize     0x0200  1x 512 bytes
        bInterval             255
Device Qualifier (for other device speed):
  bLength                10
  bDescriptorType         6
  bcdUSB               2.00
  bDeviceClass            0 (Defined at Interface level)
  bDeviceSubClass         0 
  bDeviceProtocol         0 
  bMaxPacketSize0        64
  bNumConfigurations      1
Device Status:     0x0000
  (Bus Powered)

The newer ones are different:

Bus 001 Device 003: ID 090c:1000 Feiya Technology Corp. Flash Drive
Device Descriptor:
  bLength                18
  bDescriptorType         1
  bcdUSB               2.00
  bDeviceClass            0 (Defined at Interface level)
  bDeviceSubClass         0 
  bDeviceProtocol         0 
  bMaxPacketSize0        64
  idVendor           0x090c Feiya Technology Corp.
  idProduct          0x1000 Flash Drive
  bcdDevice           11.00
  iManufacturer           1 SMI Corporation
  iProduct                2 USB DISK
  iSerial                 3 AA04012700019795
  bNumConfigurations      1
  Configuration Descriptor:
    bLength                 9
    bDescriptorType         2
    wTotalLength           32
    bNumInterfaces          1
    bConfigurationValue     1
    iConfiguration          0 
    bmAttributes         0x80
      (Bus Powered)
    MaxPower              100mA
    Interface Descriptor:
      bLength                 9
      bDescriptorType         4
      bInterfaceNumber        0
      bAlternateSetting       0
      bNumEndpoints           2
      bInterfaceClass         8 Mass Storage
      bInterfaceSubClass      6 SCSI
      bInterfaceProtocol     80 Bulk (Zip)
      iInterface              0 
      Endpoint Descriptor:
        bLength                 7
        bDescriptorType         5
        bEndpointAddress     0x81  EP 1 IN
        bmAttributes            2
          Transfer Type            Bulk
          Synch Type               None
          Usage Type               Data
        wMaxPacketSize     0x0200  1x 512 bytes
        bInterval             255
      Endpoint Descriptor:
        bLength                 7
        bDescriptorType         5
        bEndpointAddress     0x02  EP 2 OUT
        bmAttributes            2
          Transfer Type            Bulk
          Synch Type               None
          Usage Type               Data
        wMaxPacketSize     0x0200  1x 512 bytes
        bInterval             255
Device Qualifier (for other device speed):
  bLength                10
  bDescriptorType         6
  bcdUSB               2.00
  bDeviceClass            0 (Defined at Interface level)
  bDeviceSubClass         0 
  bDeviceProtocol         0 
  bMaxPacketSize0        64
  bNumConfigurations      1
Device Status:     0x0000
  (Bus Powered)

Regards,
Heinz

restamp Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I realize this thread pertains to USB sticks, but
> I want to make sure people are aware that it is
> possible to program the Dockstar to boot from USB
> pocket-drives (hard drives in a USB enclosure) as
> well. I recently ordered a Seagate FreeAgent Go 1
> TB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive from
> Amazon for a little over $100. It arrived today,
> and I have been playing with it.
>
> First, being a FreeAgent drive, it is designed to
> mount directly onto the Dockstar. I partitioned
> the drive into 4 sections and copied the
> partitions from my USB stick to the FreeAgent
> drive. When I was done, I found I could reliably
> warm- or cold-boot from the hard drive. Indeed, I
> could remove the USB stick entirely. Since I
> intend to use the Dockstar as a data repository on
> my LAN, I need a large attached storage device
> anyway, and the root, swap, and home partitions on
> it simply come along for the ride.
>
> I'm a member of the SheevaPlug forum, too.
> Booting from a hard drive was always problematic
> with the SheevaPlug, because it only has one USB
> port, and a questionable power supply, so most
> folks stuck a powered USB hub between the
> SheevaPlug and the USB devices. But the
> SheevaPlug's uBoot doesn't seem capable of
> reliably traversing that external USB hub and
> booting from an attached hard drive. With the
> Dockstar, there is no need for a powered hub
> between the device and the drive, since there are
> four USB ports on the device. Furthermore, I
> presume the Dockstar's PS is capable of handling a
> hard drive's power requirements, as that is what
> the device was intended to support originally.
>
> So far, I have not had any problem with the
> FreeAgent drive not being assigned the correct
> drive letter; it always seems to get the /dev/sda
> slot, something else which was not the case with
> the SheevaPlug.
>
> I haven't tested how a hard disk root file system
> behaves relative to a solid state device. I love
> the lightning fast reads on my mailbox (stored on
> an SDcard) on my SheevaPlug, and realize there
> will be rotational delays now. Perhaps the
> traffic to the extra partitions will interfere
> with streaming video to and from the device, which
> is the intended purpose for my Dockstar. We'll
> see. But, I figure I can always plug my USB stick
> back in if I want or need to.
>
> Anyway, I just want to make sure people realize
> that, unlike the SheevaPlug, the Dockstar's
> hardware and Jeff's uBoot seem to work quite well
> with a USB hard drive, and especially a FreeAgent
> drive, which was specifically designed for the
> little box. If you expect to have a hard drive
> connected to the box, you may want to consider
> letting the hard drive serve all your data needs.

restamp,

Any insight regarding using the Seagate GO drive this way, especially re streaming video? I'm considering using the1TB GO drive as a NAS for streaming video files and backup storage for other PCs.

Thanks

bodhi, I have used a Seagate GO drive for streaming video for over a year now, and it works fine. Actually, before I found out about the Dockstar, I had configured a SheevaPlug for just this purpose. I don't use MythTV. Maybe I should, but instead I cobbled together my own scripts to record programming OTA using an HDHomeRun tuner box and cron. I record the material to an older (5400 RPM) 880MB GO drive attached to the SheevaPlug. I use NFS to serve up this programming. I've used it to record two hi-def programs simultaneously while serving up a third and it works well. I've played with a DockStar with a 1TB GO drive for the same purpose and it also seems to work OK, although I still have the SheevaPlug dedicated to that task, and thus I can't say I have a lot of experience with using the DockStar in this capacity. If there are latent problems, I suspect it would be due to the DockStar's tighter memory. Right now it is my backup for when (not if) my SheevaPlug's PS eventually bites the dust.

OK, there are a couple minor problems I've observed: The GO drive has a tendency to spin down when not in use. Not a problem per se, but it does introduce a 4-5 sec delay on spin-up on the SheevaPlug. This can cause a couple seconds glitch in the recorded material at the beginning. It only is a problem with hi-def material, not std-def, and I think it is because the memory fills up while the OS is waiting for the disk to spin up in order to start writing the buffers. Not really a problem for me, and it may not be a problem at all on the DockStar for the following reason: On the SheevaPlug, I run the OS on an SDcard, whereas on the DockStar, the OS is on the disk. Thus, on the DS, the disk should spin up to load the recording program, and thus the program would always see a spinning disk.

The other thing I've noticed is that NFS seems to have less overhead than Samba. Samba works, but not flawlessly, and a hardwired connection is better than WiFi.

Finally, I have a problem that has nothing to do with the DockStar/SheevaPlug: My 100baseT network just isn't up to the task of serving up hi-def programming through more than about 2 switches. If I try to do this, I lose frames.

Anyway, that's my situation. Take it for what it's worth.

Good luck!

Cold and warm boot - SanDisk Cruzer USB 2.0 4GB . Code above UPC is SDCZ36-004G-A11

Warm boot only: Kingston 101 Data Traveler 4GB.

Jeff, if you read these notes - thanks for all your work. Having a 5watt/$50 debian system for NFS, backups, etc is fantastic.

restamp, appreciate your tips very much! I also noticed that Samba seems to take too much overhead, but have not tried NFS for streaming before. I planned to wire the Dockstar to the 1Gb bridge that my media player is connected to and avoid all the potential problem with wireless. And also create 2 partitions Ext2 and NTFS to compare the performance. I'd expect the Ext2 will perform better, but will see if the Dockstar with NTFS will be capable of serving HD videos.

I'm wondering if the GO drive can be set to not to spin down. I recall using a Seagate tool to set the sleep interval to "never" The problem with using it this way on the Dockstar without the USB stick is it will be always spinning and shorten its life, since the Dockstar is always on.

Although people claim that Seagate has a program to change the GO drives' configurations to prevent auto-spindown, I've never figured out how to do it. If someone has successfully done this, I'd be interested in the details. But, even with the spindown, the drive is still eminently usable; you just get a short delay occasionally. Personally, I feel the default 5-minute timeout is a bit tight. If I had the means, I think I'd set it to around 15 mins, rather than disable the timeout completely.

I've just tried the Free Agent Tools that came with the drive. You can set the sleep interval from 3 minutes to 5 hours, or never. The settings are 3, 5,10, 15, 30 minutes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 hours, and never.

Patriot XPorter XT Rage 8GB (PEF8GRUSB):

Needs "fw_setenv usb_init 'usb stop; usb start; run usb_scan'" to cold boot but then works great (and fast).

Details:

root@fredl:~# lsusb -v
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 13fe:3800 Kingston Technology Company Inc.
[...]
idVendor 0x13fe Kingston Technology Company Inc.
idProduct 0x3800
bcdDevice 1.00
iManufacturer 1
iProduct 2 Patriot Memory

root@fredl:~# hdparm -tT /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 610 MB in 2.00 seconds = 304.90 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 40 MB in 3.13 seconds = 12.78 MB/sec
root@fredl:~# dd count=100 bs=1M if=/dev/zero of=./test.img
100+0 Datensätze ein
100+0 Datensätze aus
104857600 Bytes (105 MB) kopiert, 13,5205 s, 7,8 MB/s

hkramski Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Patriot XPorter XT Rage 8GB (PEF8GRUSB):
>
> Needs "fw_setenv usb_init 'usb stop; usb start;
> run usb_scan'" to cold boot but then works great
> (and fast).
>
> Details:
>
> root@fredl:~# lsusb -v
> Bus 001 Device 003: ID 13fe:3800 Kingston
> Technology Company Inc.

You WILL eventually have problems with that brand of stick. Both Patriot and Kingston are notoriously unreliable and prone to not being able to boot after some use.

hanker Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I use a 4 GB Adata flash drive. It has worked
> since I first set up the Dockstar/Debian in early
> September. It's been running 24/7 since then
> (except for a couple of power outages). No
> problems at all with the flash drive.


This Adata flash drive has been running 24/7 since last September, boot and swap partitions. It finally wore out yesterday. I tried to reformat it on a Mac - no go. The OS X Disk Utility just hangs. I tried to format it on a linux box - no go - gparted hangs while trying to create a new partition table. fdisk from the command line fails. It's dead dead dead :)

Fortunately I had cloned the drive using clonezilla (a great tool IMO) so I was able to restore to another flash drive, and it works fine.

Frak, should have read this thread more closely... thanks for the warning!

4GB & 8GB Spaceloop from CnMemory works fine too.

hanker Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> This Adata flash drive has been running 24/7 since
> last September, boot and swap partitions. It
> finally wore out yesterday. I tried to reformat it
> on a Mac - no go. The OS X Disk Utility just
> hangs. I tried to format it on a linux box - no go
> - gparted hangs while trying to create a new
> partition table. fdisk from the command line
> fails. It's dead dead dead :)
>
> Fortunately I had cloned the drive using
> clonezilla (a great tool IMO) so I was able to
> restore to another flash drive, and it works fine.


How would you rate your usage? My Dockstar is pretty quiet right now, barely uses swap and mostly just writes logfiles. Can you describe what you used your dockstar for to gauge the usage pattern that would kill a thumbdrive in 5 months?

(For comparison: I ran a 8GB PNY rebranded thumbdrive for 2 years without any loss in capacity, but again, that box had no swap and was not used in ways that would have a lot of disk writes.)

rat Wrote:



> How would you rate your usage? My Dockstar is
> pretty quiet right now, barely uses swap and
> mostly just writes logfiles. Can you describe what
> you used your dockstar for to gauge the usage
> pattern that would kill a thumbdrive in 5 months?


Pretty heavy usage running rtorrent 24/7. There was usually about 40 - 50 MB swap.

The drive that died had no access light, and neither does the temporary drive that it's booted from now, but I'm preparing a new flash drive with an access light so I can get some idea of how often it's being accessed. (As if that will make any difference :)

It has definitely taught me to keep a new usb stick prepared just in case.

Edit: I should point out that's it's not definite that the drive wore out. It could have been a bad drive all along. But it worked fine, 24/7, from early last September until February 12, and then crashed bad, wouldn't boot, and can't be formatted or even have a new partition table written to it.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/16/2011 02:15PM by hanker.

hanker Wrote:
> Pretty heavy usage running rtorrent 24/7. There
> was usually about 40 - 50 MB swap.
>
> The drive that died had no access light, and
> neither does the temporary drive that it's booted
> from now, but I'm preparing a new flash drive with
> an access light so I can get some idea of how
> often it's being accessed. (As if that will make
> any difference :)
>
> It has definitely taught me to keep a new usb
> stick prepared just in case.
>
> Edit: I should point out that's it's not definite
> that the drive wore out. It could have been a bad
> drive all along. But it worked fine, 24/7, from
> early last September until February 12, and then
> crashed bad, wouldn't boot, and can't be formatted
> or even have a new partition table written to it.

I use the HP Flash Drive Formatter tool, it's for windows, though. Fixes drives I couldn't do ANYTHING with in other systems. So if you have a Winbox somewhere, it's worth a try: http://ergh.org/misc/SP27608-2.1.8.exe (Mirrored on my own host, can't directly link to it from HP's site)

I would say, though, running torrents does involve a lot of cluster re-writing as it preserves the space before it downloads the chunks. Still seems rather short lived overall. Happy with my Sandisk SDPlus/USB combo card, that's still going strong, fortunately.

Supertalent Duo Express 8 gig is working fine, afordable and brings maximum r/w throughput 8-)

rat Wrote:

> I use the HP Flash Drive Formatter tool, it's for
> windows, though. Fixes drives I couldn't do
> ANYTHING with in other systems. So if you have a
> Winbox somewhere, it's worth a try:
> http://ergh.org/misc/SP27608-2.1.8.exe (Mirrored
> on my own host, can't directly link to it from
> HP's site)


I tried using the HP utility to format my dead Adata flash drive on a Windows 7 machine. I tried to format it to FAT32. First it says "Partitioning the device...". Then after about 10 - 15 minutes it pops up a dialog that says "Device media is write-protected."

It does this whether "Quick format" is checked or not.

There's no write-protect switch on the drive, and it just stopped working one day after the Dockstar had been up and running for days. And there's no way I know of that a flash drive can suddenly "accidentally" become write-protected :)

Weird.

But the Dockstar is again running strong on a new flash drive built from a clonezilla image of the original Debian + rtorrent + NFS software load from last September.

hanker Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I tried using the HP utility to format my dead
> Adata flash drive on a Windows 7 machine. I tried
> to format it to FAT32. First it says "Partitioning
> the device...". Then after about 10 - 15 minutes
> it pops up a dialog that says "Device media is
> write-protected."
>
> It does this whether "Quick format" is checked or
> not.
>
> There's no write-protect switch on the drive, and
> it just stopped working one day after the Dockstar
> had been up and running for days. And there's no
> way I know of that a flash drive can suddenly
> "accidentally" become write-protected :)
>
> Weird.

You probably exhausted the write cycles on the thumbdrive. A block will become read only when it can no longer be changed, the thumbdrive's logic chip would then mark that block as inaccessible and remap it elsewhere... So in effect, it's read only. You don't actually LOSE the block, it just can't be changed anymore. My guess is that it got corrupted into a read only state.

As others have pointed out, Patriot USB sticks are unreliable! The version I am using is the Patriot XT Rage 16GB. It does not cold boot.

I have an old Dane-Elec 2GB USB stick lying around from my NSLU which I'll re-use. Hopefully, that will work. I'll post back if it does not.

Digisol 47201 Multi-Cardreader + Sandisk Extreme III CompactFlash works fine (cold+hot-boot)
(Much faster than my Patriot XT Rage)

Transcend JetFlash 2.0 (512 MB) (TS512MJF2A) doesn't boot. Only tested cold boot, with and without the partition being marked bootable. uBoot says:

U-Boot 2010.09 (Oct 23 2010 - 11:53:10)
Marvell-GoflexNet by Jeff Doozan, Peter Carmichael

SoC:   Kirkwood 88F6281_A0
DRAM:  128 MiB
NAND:  256 MiB
In:    serial
Out:   serial
Err:   serial
Net:   egiga0
88E1116 Initialized on egiga0
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0
(Re)start USB...
USB:   Register 10011 NbrPorts 1
USB EHCI 1.00
scanning bus for devices... 2 USB Device(s) found
       scanning bus for storage devices... EHCI fail timeout STD_ASS reset
EHCI fail timeout STD_ASS reset
EHCI fail timeout STD_ASS reset
[line repeats over and over]

Transcend Ultra Speed 8MB works just fine!


root@debian:~# hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 540 MB in 2.00 seconds = 269.67 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 84 MB in 3.04 seconds = 27.65 MB/sec
root@debian:~# dd count=100 bs=1M if=/dev/zero of=./test.img
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 43.6756 s, 2.4 MB/s