meteohub.de

Dear Tester,

how many "rounds" is an SLC USB Stick good for?

You don't need to crash one - but is it realy factor 10?

Greetings
Dirk

I have these sticks still in my evaluation, which are constantly being tortured until they fade...

• Delock Nano 4GB (the pure black version, http://delock.de/produkte/gruppen/Speic ... anguage=EN)
• Patriot XporterXT Boost 8GB (unfortunately this one does not boot reliabe on the iConnect)
• Integral Endurance SLC 4GB SD card (connected with a SD card reader)
• SuperTalent Pico 4GB
• a custom made SLC sample stick from china
• Transcend JetFlash 130 4GB (known SLC)

All these are by far better than the already failed sticks, but please stay tuned...

From the easy available ones the Delock Nano (part number 54236) and the Patriot XporterXT have good write speeds (measured 8 MB/s) and seem to have reasonable reliabilty. But it is much too early to be sure on that.

Is there any update on how well the remaining USB sticks are doing? It's Christmas, so hopefully lots of folks buying them!

Remaining are at 50-60 million cycles. I expect most of them dropping off bedore reaching 100 million cycles, but we 'll se.

"Delock Nano 4GB" (Part number 54236, the pure black one) seem to be pretty stable and reasonable fast.

Boris
What do you think about the Sharkoon Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo --> should be a SLC one
I'm currently using 2 of them.

The Sharkoon Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo has the typical cheesy name that comes along with most thumb drives,
but this one doesn't follow the traditional paths. To start things off,
this USB 3.0 drive uses Single-Level Cell (SLC) flash, the same flash found on enterprise SSDs.
The SLC flash gives the Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo the ability to read and write data at the same speed, 130MB/s

BTW installing Meteohub on Iconnect via USB stick is really easy. All is done within 5 minutes.
Really well done Boris

Regards Billy

looks like a cool stick, but too expensive for me

"Delock Nano 4GB (type 54236 only)" is now at 80 million writes, without failure... and the form factor is really cute

While I had very good experience with above DeLock Nano, another one I recently purchased did not show proper operation from the beginning and was very slow in operation on top of that. This is a real pitty, as the one I started with was very surprising. Looks like there are different types with identical serial IDs on the market

As the reliability of the DeLock Nano does varry that much, I decided to open my failed one... and surprise,
IT IS NOT A USB STICK, but a microSD card reader! The mircoSD card is fitted into the connecting side of the USB connector
This also explains why this "stick" does report in Linux like this: Knowing that, it is very obvious, that the quality of the "stick" does depend on the quality of the used microSD card and DeLock does for sure source that differently between lots. As a result, I can no longer recommend that stick as long as you don't have a decent mircoSD card to swap in instead of the one that comes along with the "stick"

Hi Boris,

Just a quick comment regarding USB sticks and card reader / adapters in general.

While experimenting with different USB drives and micro SD cards (with the main goal of trying to find a low profile USB stick or card adapter that works well with the Iconnect/Meteohub system), I was frustrated by several failures to get micro SD cards to boot properly, even though they imaged correctly. I initially attributed my microSD card failures to simply being "new" to the Meteohub / Linux process and not understanding the correct way to image them. Now I am of the opinion that not all card adapters work identically or not all microSD cards work well.

Boris, your photo of the Delock Nano made remember that I purchased a very inexpesive microSD card adapter when I first started off and it looks very much like your Delock Nano. In this particular card adapter, I tried to run a SanDisk 4gb, class 2 micro SD card (it was what I had in my junk box) and having that fail to boot even though it imaged correctly, I went out and purchased a Patriot 8gb class 10 card microSD card ...it too imaged correctly but failed to boot. Having an old 4gb USB stick SanDisk Cruzer laying about, I imaged it and tried it in an effort to troubleshoot what was going on...lo and behold, it worked and booted. I never thought much more about the microSD cards until seeing your photo above.

So, its interesting that your Delock Nano is nothing more than a card adapter with a microSD card in it. This means not all microSD cards are the same and that even expensive class 10 cards from reputable manufacturers can have boot issues. It could also mean different quality card adapters would work with these particular microSD cards... something Ill have to experiment with sometime. Could it be that a proper card reader would work with these microSD cards where this inexpesive microSD card adapter would not? More experiments to do!

One last note for those people reading this, SLC based USB sticks are very difficult to find in the USA. Virtually all of USB sticks available here at major retailers are MLC based...even deliberately searching for SLC based USB drives on major internet retailers turns up little. It appears that most consumers in this part of the world are either fine with MLC based chips due to cost issues, or are oblivious to the advantages of SLC based chips have on speed and reliability. I spent the better part of two days looking at numerous North American retailers, looking for a major vendor that sold SLC based sticks and found only one mention, that being an SLC based USB stick from Hewlett Packard (HP). I did find a few very small distributors selling SLC sticks, and they have to be ordered in from China as they are not stocked here.

Boris, if you're testing USB sticks for reliability, you might want to include a couple of the MLC based sticks that are more commonly available in NA markets (you cant easily get a Delock Nano in the US by the way...i know because I looked). One USB stick I see at virtually every retailer here is a SanDisk Cruzer...it might be interesting to see how well or poorly it stands up.

A comment on the Cruzer... I've set up my system to use a 4gb Cruzer and over the past several weeks, I have been experiencing random crashes that I cant attribute to anything else other than being a bad stick. Fed up with the random crashes, last night I installed the latest image onto an ATP NanoVision 4gb USB stick. It boots up nicely, has a small form factor and the same blue LED lights the Iomega has. The Iomega accepts it, flashes well with the reset button and loaded nicely . Numerous power on and offs has it booting reliably. Only time will tell if it holds up and doesn't crash like the Cruzer.

So for those people considering North American retailer easy to find USB stick alternatives, I cant recommend the MLC based SanDisk Cruzer because of the random crashes I've been experiencing, but to be fair, maybe Boris can test one properly...could be I just had a bad one. Ill give feedback on the ATP NanoVision in several weeks (sooner if problems develop).

Dave
N5XL

Thanks for all the details.

The sticks I do test are mostly MLC as I share your finding, that SLC is extremely hard to find and/or very expensive.

Up to now I couldn't find the very best stick for Meteohub on earth, but the Super-Talent Pico performed well and the Patriot Xporter Boost 4GB is also promising, but I have not finished tests on it (warning: the 8GB version will not boot, so don't try this).

A slow, but reasonable reliable alternative is to use a SD card USB adapter with the Intergal Endurance SLC SD card. I did not try microSD as there are close to zero SLC microSD cards available. Some SD card reader work, some do not. I did list a few on the iConnect pages of smartbedded.com.

I also did some experiments with a SLC sample stick imported from china. This behaved OK, but was not better than the best MLC sticks I found so far. As I would need to import a minimum of 100 pieces, I decided not to go that way and started my testing approach as reported in the neighbour thread.

This is my boneyard of destroyed sticks... Better I do not sum up the expense

If someone is interested to run the same test program on his Linux system to destroy some of his sample sticks, I can drop the code (very basic code without bells and whistles) to make these results comparable to my findings.

Boris,

I would be willing to try out your code, but I'd really like to run it in a Windows environment (Windows 7). If you think your code will work inside an emulator, I'll be glad to give it a try.

I'd like to get a general idea of how it takes to test a typical 4gb USB stick to say 100 rounds...1000 round? If its not possible to give an exact answer, a general range would be fine. Is this something that takes several days of 24 hour testing to get meaningful results? If so, I may be better off if I dig out an old PC, install a version of Linux on it and simply dedicate it to destructive testing.

Dave

I've had a (black) DeLock Nano 4GB and a Patriot Xporter Boost 8GB (which did boot OK for me - for a while) fail in my new iConnect within days. Frustrating. Almost wish I'd kept my NSLU2! I'll try the Super Talent Pico next - getting desparate.

Mark.

Regarding test times, it takes at least 4 weeks unstopped operation to make 100 Million writes. The program does not handle interrupts of operation nicely. As it runs on my 24/7 operating server, I can start it with a stick and forget about it, just checking the log file from time to time. To have that running on a PC that gets nightly shutdowns would not be very impractical.

I wonder that the 8GB Xporter XT boost did run on your iConnect. I tried many times with mine and it constantly failed booting. Maybe it is a very tight timing issue. Did the Xporter finally failed to boot any more or did you experience data loss resp wear out problems?

I also had one Delock Nano that instantly failed, while another one (with a better MicroSD card in it) took over 100 Million writes.

Re the Patriot Xporter Boost 8GB failure, it looked like a wear out problem: within 2 or 3 days it started skipping the every minute uploads to my Weather Display Live (WDL) site, and the 5 minute uploads to Weather Underground (WU). Eventually it stopped updating WU at all. I could still access the Meteohub pages though, and it was still logging data and saving copies of the WDL files in the mirror folder, so it looked like some sort of progressive corruption to me. I tried rebooting, and then it wouldn't reboot.

I've ordered a Super Talent Pico, but in the meantime I recovered the Xporter with a low level format and a re-image of Meteohub. It's up and running again for now.

Mark.