Reliable USB flash drives

P

Paul Floyd

This morning I bricked a Kingston Traveller 64Gb USB flash drive when using dd to put 15.0-BETA4 amd64 onto the drive.

It's the second time this has happened. The first was just after I got a pair of drives and Kingston replaced it. Now it looks like FreeBSD was at fault.

Any recommendations for USB flash drives that FreeBSD won't brick if I use them with dd?
 
Paul Floyd said:
This morning I bricked a Kingston Traveller 64Gb USB flash drive when using dd to put 15.0-BETA4 amd64 onto the drive.

It's the second time this has happened. The first was just after I got a pair of drives and Kingston replaced it. Now it looks like FreeBSD was at fault.

Any recommendations for USB flash drives that FreeBSD won't brick if I use them with dd?
Click to expand...
They are all garbage. Look for USB flash drivers that are actually SSDs packed in the USB enclosure. However, you also need to be careful there as well, because some of them get hot really fast, and the throttle really bad, and you will literally get USB 2.0 speeds at best or they simply stop working until they cool off. To be honest, i would just go for external USB SSD drive in metal enclosure. Its the only way to be safe.
 
cracauer@ said:
It seems unlikely that dd damaged the drive except by being too fast or something.
Click to expand...

I still have one Kingston drive. I'm not going to see if FreeBSD makes it 3 bricked out of 3. Either I'm very unlucky or there is a bug in FreeBSD.

I'm not going to get an external enclosure. This is only for casual use.
 
bvdw78 said:
FreeBSD does not brick any flash drives. It does nothing out of the ordinary, just writes to the storage device. If the device can't handle writes and breaks down, that's the device's fault not the OS.
Click to expand...

I'm not going to waste any money doing experiments. Two out of two bricked drives is enough to convince me that FreeBSD is at fault.
 
Paul Floyd said:
Fedora 0% failure rate.
FreeBSD 100% failure rate.
Same PC.
Click to expand...
Still means nothing. Driver in Linux is different, which means controller behaves differently. Your testing method rules out nothing. Also, for the arguments sake, lets say you are right. Lets say that dd is in fact destroying drivers. Do you really think you would be the only one to complain? Just think about that.
 
I cannot say that I trust Kingston hardware, for me it didn't end well:
gotnull

Solved Post in thread 'USB 3.0 [UFS] - Incredibly slow speed'

5 years ago I bought 2 USB key Kingston model DataTraveler 16G, both were pretty slow and both died something like 3 month after I bought them.
Couldn't mount or format them, I tried few tools, nothing worked both keys were just dead, the product is so bad I didn't even bother with RMA and I put them in a box where they still are ...
Overall I had 4 USB keys from Kingston, they all died in a short period of time.
Since I didn't buy any USB key from them and switched to Sandisk.
While their product aren't bullet proof either, the speed writing is as good as expected and in most cases I...
  • Thanks
 
Bricked dmesg:
usb_msc_auto_quirk: UQ_MSC_NO_TEST_UNIT_READY set for USB mass storage device Phison USB DISK
53X (0x13fe:0x5500)
usb_msc_auto_quirk: UQ_MSC_NO_PREVENT_ALLOW set for USB mass storage device Phison USB DISK 53
X (0x13fe:0x5500)
ugen0.15: <Phison USB DISK 53X> at usbus0
umass0 on uhub5
umass0: <Phison USB DISK 53X, class 0/0, rev 3.20/1.10, addr 17> on usbus0
umass0: SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0x8001
umass0:8:0: Attached to scbus8
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus8 target 0 lun 0
da0: <13FE USB DISK 50X PMAP> Removable Direct Access SPC-2 SCSI device
da0: Serial Number
da0: 400.000MB/s transfers
da0: Attempt to query device size failed: NOT READY, Medium not present
da0: quirks=0x3<NO_SYNC_CACHE,NO_6_BYTE>

Non-bricked dmesg:
ugen0.15: <Kingston DataTraveler 3.0> at usbus0
umass0 on uhub5
umass0: <Kingston DataTraveler 3.0, class 0/0, rev 3.20/1.10, addr 16> on usbus0
umass0: SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0xc000
umass0:8:0: Attached to scbus8
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): REPORT LUNS. CDB: a0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 10 00 00
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI status: Check Condition
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI sense: ILLEGAL REQUEST asc:20,0 (Invalid command operation cod
e)
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Error 22, Unretryable error
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus8 target 0 lun 0
da0: <Kingston DataTraveler 3.0 0000> Removable Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device
da0: Serial Number E0D55E6B64641841C8300ABB
da0: 400.000MB/s transfers
da0: 59120MB (121077760 512 byte sectors)
da0: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE>
 
gotnull said:
I cannot say that I trust Kingston hardware, for me it didn't end well:
gotnull

Solved Post in thread 'USB 3.0 [UFS] - Incredibly slow speed'

5 years ago I bought 2 USB key Kingston model DataTraveler 16G, both were pretty slow and both died something like 3 month after I bought them.
Couldn't mount or format them, I tried few tools, nothing worked both keys were just dead, the product is so bad I didn't even bother with RMA and I put them in a box where they still are ...
Overall I had 4 USB keys from Kingston, they all died in a short period of time.
Since I didn't buy any USB key from them and switched to Sandisk.
While their product aren't bullet proof either, the speed writing is as good as expected and in most cases I...
  • Thanks
Click to expand...

As a reminder, the subject is "Reliable USB flash drives". I don't need to be told that Kingston drives can be problematic.
 
Paul Floyd said:
Wow I'm getting a lot of "blame the user" arrogance.

How do you know?
Click to expand...
Because if dd was actually killing flash drivers, you would be reading about this everywhere. And if Kingston is really that bad, no one would buy them. Its a simple elimination logic. But here you are blaming the dd and Kingston.

Buy a new usb flash drive from Transcend, go to a completely new system and use dd from freebsd to write on it. Let us know if it dies.
 
Paul Floyd said:
As a reminder, the subject is "Reliable USB flash drives". I don't need reminding that I'm having problems with Kingston drives.
Click to expand...
I didn't bother respond to your question directly because I already answer it in the post I linked, I thought you would at least read it.

MrBSD said:
And if Kingston is really that bad, no one would buy them
Click to expand...
This is how you measure the quality of the hardware?
Please do the research you'll see that a lot of people had trouble with this model.
 
MrBSD said:
Still means nothing. Driver in Linux is different, which means controller behaves differently. Your testing method rules out nothing. Also, for the arguments sake, lets say you are right. Lets say that dd is in fact destroying drivers. Do you really think you would be the only one to complain? Just think about that.
Click to expand...

The drives in question are this model
www.ldlc.com

Kingston DataTraveler Exodia M 64 Go - Clé USB - LDLC

Achat Clé USB Kingston DataTraveler Exodia M 64 Go (DTXM/64GB) sur LDLC, n°1 du high-tech. Clé USB 3.0 64 Go avec capuchon de protection et anneau pour porte-clés.
www.ldlc.com www.ldlc.com

The first one was bricked on my old HP Xeon workstation running 14.2-RELEASE
The second was bricked on my new workstation with an Asus mobo running 14.3-RELEASE.

I _do_ think that there is a significant chance that I'm the only one that is complaining about FreeBSD dd bricking Kingston DataTraveler Exodia M 64 Go USB flash drives.
 
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