USB drives and ext4 these days

[Condobloke]

I have bought from el cheapo chinese online stores, an array of usb sticks.

In total, approx. 10 of them

I only format to ext4......with the very occasional fat32

The purchase took place ~ 12 months ago

In most cases I have needed to create a new partition table on each one. Using gparted this takes a minute or two.

I do not know why that has been necessary, other than the process of formatting to ext4 would not continue without me doing that.

All 10 are alive and doing well. I have used 1 of them as a Ventoy stick.

I install different os's on them from time to time as the need arises....without any dramas. I use usb Image Writer to write to the sticks (It comes included on Linux Mint.)

The sizes of the usb sticks varies between 16GB and 32GB

 

[MikeRocor]

Just now, I idly picked up a Lexar Firefly 512 MB USB stick from about 2011 and thought, "why don't I just give it the standard treatment and see if it will

• still work
• take an ext4 and an EFI partition
• take a dual grub2 installation (so it will work in either a UEFI or a BIOS computer)
• install Tiny Core on it with GUI and a standard set of tools
• see how much room is left on it

To the surprise of my memory-challenged brain, I found that I had already done exactly that just last December. Of course, back then it was Tiny Core 15.0 instead of 16.1, but whatever. Popped it into a spare laptop and it booted right up. Of course, a stick that size as a boot device is just curiosity when, to plug it in, I unplugged a 64 GB USB3 stick which is configured the same way (but with the current version of he OS and a bit more of the bulkier applications thrown in). The old 512 MB stick will be a prime candidate for getting wiped and used as a disposable device to give files to someone, but it's cool that it still works.

Speaking of "still works", the very first USB stick I ever owned served me well for a goodly long time before I lost it in the middle of winter one year. I found it in my parking area at home in the springtime after it had laid in the snow and gravel and had been run over by my car a bunch of times over a period of two or three months. After drying it out, I had to straighten the end a bit to get it to fit into my computer but it still worked. The "straightening out" was less than perfect so it was hard to use, but I was able to get all my data off of it before retiring it. I don't remember what brand it was but my circumstances in those days were such that it was almost certainly something cheap.

 

[Brickwizard]

the very first USB stick I ever owned served me well

my very first USB stick is circa 1998 [white insert USB 1.1] is a huge [by the standards of the time] 256mb its a bit slow by modern standards but is still in daily use in the car with about 300 mp3 songs/music on

 

[MikeRocor]

still in daily use in the car with about 300 mp3 songs/music on

Must be nice... my idiot car won't recognize more than 256 songs total (regardless of subdirectories). It also wants to sort them by album, artist, genre or some other criteria that I don't care about. I've gone so far as to remove all the metadata from the mp3 files, which means I can't just drop a new bunch of files onto the stick - I have to sanitize them first.

 

[dos2unix]

my idiot car won't recognize more than 256 songs total

My 2015 car was the same. My 2021 car does much better. 3326 songs on a USB drive.

 

[rado84]

I had no clue USB's don't support all FS's.
Anyway I have 3 sticks and one of them is Kingston 64G, but I see no reason to format them to anything because only purpose they serve me is to have a live stick and netinst which doesn't need any FS's, just ISO burn directly to device.

When ALL of your filesystems are XFS (mine are), the difference in transfer between them (using rsync) is gigantic. This flash drive from the screenshot above transferred all of the 6 seasons of Supergirl (168 GB) in approx. 12 minutes which means average speed of 240 MB/s transfer speed. Because rsync utilizes the full potential of the filesystem, especially if the fs in question is fast and meant for speed (XFS was originally developed by Red Hat and was meant for servers, therefore was optimized for maximum speed). Whereas with ntfs, exfat, fat32 or ISO-something the top speed you can hope for is maybe (if you're lucky) 30 MB/s or less.

 

[KGIII]

For what it's worth, I've been using dirt cheap TeamGroup thumb drives since I first decided to give them a try several years ago. They just work. I've yet to have one fail. I've formatted them with the various file formats, such as exFAT and ext4.

 

[MikeRocor]

My 2015 car was the same. My 2021 car does much better. 3326 songs on a USB drive.

I hope my car, a Toyota Camry will last a good long time and that it will be the last car I ever own because every newer car I've seen has all kinds of "features" that I find intolerable. On the other hand, I somehow doubt this car will last as long as I myself hope to last.

A sanely programmed sound system wouldn't be enough to make me think the more modern cars are worth having.