[bookport] Re: FILESYSTEM MUSINGS
- From: "David Tanner" <david-tanner@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bookport@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 00:10:28 -0500
My guess is that what is happening is the same as what happens on a hard drive.
The index files that get written on the drive are very small, and these files
have more of a tendancy to get corrupted in any number of ways, but as you say,
when you reformat the card this problem gets erased. If you notice that for
each file that you copy to the memory card from the computer you end up with
three. If you have a very big card you could have several hundred small files.
When you start adding and deleting these small files there is a high chance
that there will eventually be problems, but these problems exist just as much
with really small files on a hard drive as they do on the BookPort. I think it
is just more obvious because there is a higher percentage of such files on a
small memory card in a BookPort.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Buhrow" <buhrow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <bookport@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2005 10:49 AM
Subject: [bookport] FILESYSTEM MUSINGS
: Hello. I've been reading this list for a couple of months, and have
: noticed what seems to be a somewhat common thread which appears to match my
: experience, and which, if it's true, raises issues which I think should be
: addressed in order to make the user experience for the bookport an even
: happier one.
: From what I can tell, there are a number of users who purchase their
: bookports from APH, get them home, load them up with data, read from them,
: and are completely happy with them. Then, after a month or two of use,
: when books have been cycled through the unit, and the user is feeling more
: comfortable putting more and more on the Bookport, he begins experiencing
: difficulties when transfering data to the Bookport. Flash cards fill
: unexpectedly during transfers, users encounter file coruption during the
: reading process, or weird errors just happen, seemingly from no where.
: the advice on this list, generally, seems to be that flash cards get
: corrupted, and they either have gone bad, or need to be reformatted before
: they work again for another month or two.
: My experience coincides with this description. I have had my Bookport
: for about four months, and have had to reformat the flash card I use most
: often at least once. It's now been about six weeks since I last
: reformatted my flash card, and I'm now beginning to see anomolous behavior,
: which I suspect will go away if I reformat my card yet again.
: All of this is to say that I think there is a subttle filesystem bug
: in the Bookport which no one yet quite understands. On clean, i.e. newly
: formatted flash cards, things work well. Then, as material comes and goes
: from the filesystem on the flash card, some of it written by the host
: computer, some by the Bookport itself, the filesystem becomes "dirty" in
: the way that most filesystems become "dirty" over time. Directories become
: fragmented as items are deleted and inserted, disk block allocations become
: fragmented as well, and the efficiency of the filesystem on the flash card
: becomes less over time. All of this is normal, and should be expected.
: The rub is that the Bookport appears to not deal well with this loss of
: efficiency, and as a consequence, becomes very fickle in its operation as
: the filesystems on its flash cards age.
: While, as someone suggested, running defragmentation programs against
: the filesystems on one's flash cards for Bookport might aleviate the
: problem, I'm not convinced this will totally help because I don't think
: defragmentation programs zero out blocks they free up on the filesystems
: they fix. The behavior I observe with my bookport leads me to believe that
: the firmware makes certain assumptions about what is in its various file
: buffers, and reuses them without necessarily properly cleaning them. For
: example, I have an MP3 file on my bookport right now which reads fine,
: except if I query the percentage status while the file is playing, and I've
: read more than 50% of it. If I hit the 8 key when the latter half of the
: file is playing, I get an FS buffer panic, followed by a bunch of audio
: file read error messages, accompanied by choppy sound until I either stop
: the bookport, or it comes to the end of the file in question.
: Let me stress, though, that I'm not trying to suggest that I know what
: the problem is, or how to fix it. However, I believe there is a problem,
: and that it should be looked into. The bookport should be able to deal
: with filesystems which pass chkdsk or scandisk, but which aren't
: necessarily pristine in terms of not having been used, and users shouldn't
: have to regularly reformat their flash cards in order to preserve
: usability.
: I love my bookport, but this issue, what ever it is, certainly adds to
: my level of frustration using it, and makes it downright inconvenient at
: times, while I cajole it into working.
: -Brian
:
:
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