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Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2013 10:57 pm
by hawsey
One of my little Blue HP USB sticks recently gave up the ghost after many a month of Joggler tinkering and luckily it was still in guarantee :D
So on my hunt for a replacement possibly faster stick i came across this tiny elago mobile nano II microsd reader and think if i fitted it with say a class 10 micro sdhc card it would do the job quite well

Image

I also remember reading on a review on Amazon for a tiny usb stick possibly a Cruzer that it was actually just a reader like this thing above but being sold as a USB memory stick;
can anyone confirm this ?

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2013 11:46 pm
by Leonardo
Yesterday I ordered from Amazon a Emtec S100, 4GB for a good price. I think I'll get it on friday. It seems to be little enough to be hidden behind by the display!

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2013 11:48 pm
by ilovemyjoggler
hawsey wrote:One of my little Blue HP USB sticks recently gave up the ghost after many a month of Joggler tinkering...
Hawsey, how long should a usb last and how do you know if it's on it's way out (does it start slowing down the os/freezing/crashing or just not boot?).

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 12:06 am
by hawsey
Will have a look at that Emtec cheers
ilmj the Hp stick in question just would not be seen when plugged in to any device , tried hp reformat tool but no good nothing there to fix according to the pc or laptop .
one good thing about ordering stuff on line is that you have reciepts in your email so its easy to look back at when you bought it for refund or exchange purposes .
:smile:
When your Emtek arrives can you post if it has a microsdhc card fitted in it if you can see .
They look tiny
Sent from my BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps using Tapatalk 2 Beta-5

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 10:27 am
by Leonardo
I have a stupid question: is a USB key more reliable than a microsd inside an USB adapter?
I should not post a question like this I work in IT :D but I'm always in doubt!!! Experiences?

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 10:39 am
by Mevi
The HP format tool has managed to recover a scrambled stick that other disk utilities struggled with.

In my experience, USB sticks give little or no warning. No slowdown, just suddenly you get read errors, corrupted files and then fails to format.

I've only lost a couple this way, but it's for that reason that I don't trust USB sticks as a single backup media.. I keep important stuff backed up on a HDD or in the cloud.


I've used both SD, microSD and USB sticks with the Joggler and they all give similar performance - slow 4k write speeds. I've never worn out an SD card, but I can't say that I used them enough to say they last longer as I quickly moved to using HDDs for improved performance and capacity.

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 12:29 pm
by hawsey
I'm not sure if the Joggler itself has limits for read /write speeds but I would think that one of these mini sdhc adapters with the fastest card you can get in it ,is probably about as good as you can go without changing to an external hard drive.
Ive also heard that usb3 sticks will even work faster in usb2 ports than standard sticks, although I am doubtful about this one.:-)

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 2:05 pm
by pete
I've had OK luck with the Kingspec USB SSD sticks. Only one has gone bad and it literally fried up. I did try a Kingspec ZIF SSD and it was DOA. The speeds on the USB Kingspec SSD were OK and a bit faster than a regular USB stick. Today and for the Joggler's internal use I removed the out casing for all of the Kingspec SSD USB sticks. They are still way bigger than a regular stick.

What is working really nice though is the PATA directly connected ZIF SSD drive or the USB to ZIF to SSD drives; much faster than the EFI stuff.

I have a Seagate Dockstar running ArchLinux HA sprinkler system. Originally this box was using two of those little mini USB sticks. After about 2-3 months one of them got scrambled so went to a different stick and a CF drive as a primary drive. The CF drive while bigger seems to be working better. Right now the system is doing a nightly snapshot of itself for DR stuff. I had a similiar issue with the "Chumby" where I had been using the internal micro SD card and went to doing a ch root to the side mounted CF card.

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 2:38 pm
by gegs
hawsey wrote:I'm not sure if the Joggler itself has limits for read /write speeds but I would think that one of these mini sdhc adapters with the fastest card you can get in it ,is probably about as good as you can go without changing to an external hard drive.
Ive also heard that usb3 sticks will even work faster in usb2 ports than standard sticks, although I am doubtful about this one.:-)
I'm going to read up a bit more about the advantages/disadvantages of faster media. I read an article recently that said that class 2 cards had a fairly good constant data throughput but that for random access (which, I'm assuming, is the case for most Joggler OSes) class 6 cards and above had data transfer rates of up to 100 times slower for certain operations. For sequential write/access, e.g. copying and playing large media files, the higher class cards were indeed faster. I suppose that's why they're better in digital cameras.

My recent experience with Squeezeplay OS is that a slower USB stick (at least as far as sequential write speed was concerned) performed better and slicker than the "faster" stick I had been using until then.

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 4:38 pm
by hawsey
So that scuppers my thoughts possibly!
Pete are the Pata drives you use in the internal usb port or are these the ones you have been soldering on?

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 4:52 pm
by pete
Both. I have had odd luck with the soldered PATA port. Only 3; two work and one doesn't. Its easier with the PATA port and a long ZIF cable directly to the ZIF SSD drive. The others I am using an SSD ZIF drive to a USB connected ZIF controller board (little tiny thing) to the USB port inside of the Joggler. The speed difference is hardly noticible. The ZIF SSD though is the fastest and reasonable in price at around $20 USD for a 16Gb SSD.

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 5:28 pm
by gegs
hawsey wrote:So that scuppers my thoughts possibly! ...
Don't take my word for it regards media speeds. As I said, I'll do a bit more investigation on the topic; it was only one paper I read but it not only showed big differences between classes of card but also massive differences between different makes of card of the same class. I seem to remember that Transcend cards had better data transfer speeds in their tests than cards by other manufacturers. I wouldn't swear to any of this though without trying them out myself.

My personal experience with a slower Sandisk USB stick has been very favourable though. Squeezeplay OS run on a nominally faster Kingston stick had loads of issues, the major one being that the user interface seemed so much slower and clunky than the Sandisk. When I enabled Airplay on the Kingston it took 2 days for the Joggler to appear as an Airplay device. Yes, I said 2 days! The Sandisk, however, made the Joggler available as an Airplay device immediately.

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2013 2:11 pm
by Mevi
Interesting to read about the different classes of SD card. I wonder if the devices page size and cluster alignment makes a difference to speed?.. I read up a little on this when I was looking into the format tool I posted about in off topic.

I had a 3 year old 8G corsair voyager (10Mbs write) that was faster as an OS boot device than a 1 year old 16G Lexar which advertised itself as having 15Mb/s write 25Mb/s read speeds. The Lexar was quick to image, but noticably slower to boot and load apps from.

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2013 2:50 pm
by gegs
Mevi wrote:Interesting to read about the different classes of SD card. I wonder if the devices page size and cluster alignment makes a difference to speed?.. I read up a little on this when I was looking into the format tool I posted about in off topic.

I had a 3 year old 8G corsair voyager (10Mbs write) that was faster as an OS boot device than a 1 year old 16G Lexar which advertised itself as having 15Mb/s write 25Mb/s read speeds. The Lexar was quick to image, but noticably slower to boot and load apps from.
I'm wondering if a closer parity of the data processing speed of Joggler programs and the data transfer speed of USB sticks is also the reason for differences we're experiencing between sticks. The analogy I'm thinking of is CD/DVD writing speeds; writing a disc at a slower speed usually gives greater accuracy of data transfer and fewer CRC errors. Maybe there's a factor of slower performance sticks being more easily processed and stable than their faster counterparts, at least for Joggler use.

I have no technical knowledge in this area (or most other areas ;) ) so I might be talking bo**ocks.

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2013 2:59 pm
by BuZz
I have noticed this too.

My super talent pico-c sticks have a very fast sequential read speed, and a decent enough write speed, but it actually seems after testing with some other sticks, don't perform as well as some slower sticks for random r/w stuff like running an os. I recently purchased a 16gb pico-c and it seems much poorer than the 8gb pico-c stick I had used previously too.

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2013 3:21 pm
by gegs
The paper I read was linked to from a Wikipedia page about SD cards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital

The following paragraph about speed, from the Wikipedia page, makes interesting reading:

"The speed class rating does not totally characterize card performance. Different cards of the same class may vary considerably while meeting class specifications. In addition, speed may vary markedly between writing a large amount of data to a single file (sequential access, as when a digital camera records large photographs or videos) and writing a large number of small files (a random-access use common in smartphones). One study found that, in this random-access use, some Class 2 cards achieved a write speed of 1.38Mb/sec, while all cards tested of Class 6 or greater (and some of lower Classes; lower Class does not necessarily mean better small-file performance), including those from major manufacturers, were over 100 times slower."

The "one study" referred to was this PDF document: http://static.usenix.org/events/fast/te ... rs/Kim.pdf

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Thu Dec 19, 2013 7:49 am
by BuZz
Just an update regarding USB sticks. I had a failure on one of my Pico C sticks - I was pretty happy with it before it died though. They have a lifetime warranty so I can probably get a replacement if I bother. I had another one and I have lost that somewhere. Some months ago I purchased a couple of small Verbatim store n go sticks (http://www.verbatim-europe.co.uk/en_1/n ... html?con=2). Both have failed after very little use with write errors etc. So far they are the worst sticks I have tried running linux off on the Joggler, and they are very slow.

Now that USB 3.0 sticks are becoming more common, and offer higher speeds I have been wanting to try some out on the Joggler. People have recommended USB 3.0 sticks on devices like the raspberry pi too for their good read/write performance too.

I have just bought a couple of 8gb Fusion USB 3.0 flash drives http://www.integralmemory.com/product/f ... lash-drive

Will update how I get on. Main problem with usb flash I have found is very poor performance on small files etc so hopefully we can find a small USB 3.0 device which does better.

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Thu Dec 19, 2013 9:02 am
by BuZz
thw write speeds on the 8gb version of the sticks I mentioned above isn't all that great, but we shall see. I couldn't afford to shell out for the larger sizes :)

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Thu Dec 19, 2013 3:15 pm
by pete
I am currently using a little mini 16Gb (too big) inserted in a regular SD card holder for the Rasberry Pi.

The OS is running an automation server. That said I just did an OS update of some 20 packages and it "seemed" to take a long time.

Its difficult though for me to be able to tell whether that is the SD card or the base hardware.

Similiarly running my sprinkler software on an older Plug computer (which is 1.2Ghz) using USB, SD and or CF card. Its faster but I have already wiped out some 4 little USB sticks such that I went to using the CF card (much bigger) but it appears to be a bit more resilent (might be me though).

Re: Best USB stick for Joggler?

Posted: Tue Dec 24, 2013 12:18 pm
by BuZz
I'm pretty happy with the integral usb flash so far. Because I got the 8GB sticks, the write speed is somewhat slow at 5MB/second (or a bit over). Read speed is excellent though - not actually tried them in a USB3 port to check the top read speed, but the packaging claims 80MB/s. It maxes out USB2 anyway, and from booting xubuntu/jolios and using the desktop XBMC it seems to feel snappy enough, and a lot quicker than some previous sticks I have used. They are also nice and small, and feel solid, with a metal case.

[edit] I don't know whether I got lucky before, but this stick is running very slowly despite the fast read speed. Must have poor random access etc.