Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Morning All!

I bought two no-name thumb drives. (Yes, I know. Only an idiot would trust good data to a no-name brand, but I did.)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/404097643563

I partitioned one 64GiB thumb drive. I felt the time to complete this task was excessive. (detail below)
Anyone here got a record of a representative time to partition a drive?
Is the time to partition proportional to the size of the drive (or some non-linear relationship)?

In short, I'm confirming that my complaint has a good foundation.

Thanks. Detail below
cobaka

My hardware: i5 running at 2.4GHz (as I write this). RAM 8MiB available, 2025 used, 5937 available.
Operating System: Distro: bionicpup64 8.0 ie uPupBB64. Partitioning with gParted (what else would I use?)

From Pup-Sys-Info:
VendorID=ffff ProductID=5678 Rev=02.00
Manufacturer=USB
Product=Disk 2.0
SerialNumber=6364321103948414266
Driver=usb-storage

Further comment: A manufacturer with Vendor ID=ffff does not exist.
There is one chance in 10,000 with a product ID code = 5678.

Short report from G-Parted: - - - - - - - - - below - - - - - - -
GParted 0.30.0 --enable-libparted-dmraid --enable-online-resize
Libparted 3.2
(1) Create Primary Partition #1 (fat32, 164.00 MiB) on /dev/sdb 00:00:11 ( SUCCESS )
create empty partition 00:00:04 ( SUCCESS )

(2) Create Primary Partition #2 (ext3, 49.80 GiB) on /dev/sdb 01:23:33 ( SUCCESS )
create empty partition 00:00:05 ( SUCCESS )
path: /dev/sdb2 (partition)
start: 337920
end: 104785919
size: 104448000 (49.80 GiB)

(3) Create Primary Partition #3 (ext3, 8.63 GiB) on /dev/sdb 00:17:11 ( SUCCESS )

The times given are hh:mm:ss

@cobaka

There is a script attached which test the read/write capabilities of your new purchases.

Credit to the original poster/developer.

There is a commandline tool usbutils that you could try

usb-devices

in terminal for more info

cobaka wrote: ↑Fri May 05, 2023 8:37 pm

Morning All!

I bought two no-name thumb drives. (Yes, I know. Only an idiot would trust good data to a no-name brand, but I did.)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/404097643563

I partitioned one 64GiB thumb drive. I felt the time to complete this task was excessive. (detail below)
Anyone here got a record of a representative time to partition a drive?
Is the time to partition proportional to the size of the drive (or some non-linear relationship)?

In short, I'm confirming that my complaint has a good foundation.

Thanks. Detail below
cobaka

My hardware: i5 running at 2.4GHz (as I write this). RAM 8MiB available, 2025 used, 5937 available.
Operating System: Distro: bionicpup64 8.0 ie uPupBB64. Partitioning with gParted (what else would I use?)

From Pup-Sys-Info:
VendorID=ffff ProductID=5678 Rev=02.00
Manufacturer=USB
Product=Disk 2.0
SerialNumber=6364321103948414266
Driver=usb-storage

Further comment: A manufacturer with Vendor ID=ffff does not exist.
There is one chance in 10,000 with a product ID code = 5678.

Short report from G-Parted: - - - - - - - - - below - - - - - - -
GParted 0.30.0 --enable-libparted-dmraid --enable-online-resize
Libparted 3.2
(1) Create Primary Partition #1 (fat32, 164.00 MiB) on /dev/sdb 00:00:11 ( SUCCESS )
create empty partition 00:00:04 ( SUCCESS )

(2) Create Primary Partition #2 (ext3, 49.80 GiB) on /dev/sdb 01:23:33 ( SUCCESS )
create empty partition 00:00:05 ( SUCCESS )
path: /dev/sdb2 (partition)
start: 337920
end: 104785919
size: 104448000 (49.80 GiB)

(3) Create Primary Partition #3 (ext3, 8.63 GiB) on /dev/sdb 00:17:11 ( SUCCESS )

The times given are hh:mm:ss
record_of_purchase.png

You paid quite a lot for a no-brand. I bought a 32GB Sandisk here in Cape Town 2 weeks ago for R89 (just over 7 Aussie dollar). 64GB Sandisk generally costs about R150 but you can get cheaper if you shop around. I tend to make the Puppy partition (ext 3) relatively small (say about 8 GB) and format the rest to either ntfs or Fat32 for storage. This is for compatibility with other operating systems like Windows. BTW - That's extremely slow, could be the usb flashdrive itself that writes so extremely slowly.

@cobaka :-

Really & truly, Les, you can compare this question to the old chestnut of "How long's a piece of string?" The sheer number of variables is staggering.

• Is the drive USB 2.0?

• Is it USB 3.0?

• Is it USB 3.1?

• Is it USB 3.2 Gen 1?

• Is it USB 3.2 Gen 2?

• Are you plugged into a USB 2.0 port?

• Are you plugged into a USB 3.0 port?

• Is it a good-quality, brand-name drive?

• Is it a 'no-name' drive?

• What brand of NAND flash memory is inside the drive? (You can't check this one, unfortunately, but it WILL affect things).

• Is it single-cell NAND?

• Is it dual/triple/quad-cell NAND?

• Etc, etc, etc...

If you want a real-time, second by second readout of how your drive performs while being tested, take a look at DriveSpeed!

I got the inspiration for this from Barry's own EasyDD. During the write process, it gives a real-time readout of write speeds; I did a bit of research, 'isolated' this function from within the EasyDD script, then built a wee utility & GUI round it.

------------------------------

I'd recommend v2.2; although things go up to around v4, the project kinda got away from me, and the thread devolved into Fred & stemsee (for both of whom I have a ton of respect) playing around with the YAD-based GUI, adding more & more features to it. (It wasn't helped by Clarity, who in this case kept requesting more & more "bells & whistles". Some people seem to like everything as complicated as possible, with every option under the sun being available).

Basically, features were being requested that, at the time, were beyond my then-current skill-set. And it's not a good idea to blindly accept chunks of code from others when you don't understand what they do!

It got so toward the end of the thread I just 'abandoned' it, and left them to their own devices. I intended it to be a simple, 'one-shot' portable utility; you drag a copy onto the drive you want to test, run the test, then just delete the whole thing when you're done. It ended up turning into a massive behemoth of a thing, with a million bells & whistles, .pet & SFS packages, Menu entries & everything. I hate to admit it, but I lost control of my own project. S**t happens..!

----------------------------------------------

You can't go wrong with v2.2, because the GUI is simple, easy-to-follow, and numbered, step-by-step, to guide you through it all.

V2.2 can be obtained HERE. (That's a direct download). Unzip it, and keep a 'master copy' somewhere safe. Then, just drag a copy onto any drive you want to test; run the tests, and finally, delete the entire thing when finished. Simples!

Entirely up to you, of course. And you may be quite surprised by the disparity between read & write speeds for flash drives; even with the newest, fastest, USB 3.2 Gen 2 drives, they're still optimized for "read" over "write". They'll read like greased lightning, yet still write like a snail.....

Mike.

Did you make a new partition table before you started making partitions?
If no.
Do that before making partitions.

Ext formatting will take longer than fat32 or ntfs, but it should be around maybe a few seconds to a minute or two longer.

Yes size of the partition is a factor.

bigger the partition the longer it will take to format.

Those times you posted seem to indicate the drive may have problems.

I assume you have the drive plugged into a USB 2 or 3 port.

There is drives out there that are not really the size they claim to be.

Somehow they take a smaller size drive and make it appear to be bigger than it really is.
It is usually much bigger drives than you have, but who knows for sure what maybe someone did.

Explained here the scam for 2TB USB drives.
https://datarecovery.com/2022/03/the-2t ... are-fakes/
.
.
This tells me to run away, run away from this company offering this USB!

Shipping:
Does not ship to United States. See detailsfor shipping
Located in: Shen Zhen, China

@cobaka

Recently I bought 5 PNY brand USB 2.0 x 16gb flash drives from Amazon. They were cheap, about $3 US each. Just intended to use as Puppy giveaways. Noticed when I partitioned and formated that it was really slow. Ran Crystal Disk Mark (Windows) test on one and it's write speed is terrible. Compare it to an OLD Sandisk USB 2.0 x 16gb. The PNY drives may not be genuine, but have no way to verify. Anyway, lots of differences in speeds on lesser brands.

wizard

Found this on tools to check flash drives to see if they are fake in stated size.
https://whatsoftware.com/test-and-detec ... h-h2testw/

Nearly hour and a half for partition #2? That looks way over the top to me. I don't have any 64Gb USB sticks, but I do have a couple of 32Gb, and I don't remember anything taking any longer than a few minutes. Also bear in mind my hardware has far lower spec than yours, and only has USB 2.0 ports.

My USB sticks are mostly Kingston, with a few odd ones such as Transcend, Integral and Toshiba. Ok so they're all named brands, but I don't think any of them could be described as state of the art or top of the range. Come to think of it, I've never noticed any significant difference in speed between one USB stick and another.

Whole whopping big bunch of variables in this topic. USB port speed, USB thumb speed, filesystem type (Fat32, for instance can format in seconds), processor speed, and how much RAM you have, to name a few.

So, the short answer is: YMMV

Yeah, I know ..

@mikewalsh

Hello Mike: Thanks for advising about your app, DriveSpeed.
You wrote, "Don't forget! Clear buffers in-between runs."
Can you clarify the meaning of "run" please? Is a "run" simply a one write cycle or is a "run" a full "read+write" cycle?
Thanks,

cobaka

@cobaka :-

Difference in personal usage of grammar, I suspect..!

As far as I'm concerned, the first operation - the 'write' cycle, that creates the test file - that counts as one 'run'. Then, the subsequent 'read' operation - this is usually quite a bit faster - counts as another 'run'.

Does that clarify things?

Mike.

To conclude this posting about formattting a thumb-drive I can say:

@bigpup: You presented various points to be checked (in your earlier posting) - such as did I make a new partition table. I can't say I formatted a lot of drives - maybe only 25 or 30 in all. Until now in a few minutes. I'm confident I got a faulty/shonky drive. I'm confident I'm understand gParted.

@mikewalsh I used the testing utility you suggested and the result (for a USB 2 drive in a USB 2 socket was 'in the order of' 10MiB per second (for writing). Faster, of course, for reading.
In the final result I made 3 partitions.
P1 - perhaps 100M, FAT32. Can't remember the precise figure now. Perhaps as little as 80M. Perhaps as much as 120M.
P2 - around 48GiB, ext3.
P3 - whatever remained from a 64GiB drive.

However, while P3 showed as a expected on the desk-top I could not get access to it.
There is clearly something buggy going on here.

I told the person/shop about this and he/they offered to send a replacement.
It's coming but I expect the replacement will be also faulty.
I bought cheap. I wasted time and money. Caveat emptor! Silly me.

Cobaka