Re: Recovering from USB mass storage corruption without rebooting
- From: Daniel James <wastebasket@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2009 13:36:08 -0000
In article news:<prSfl.111$q85.63@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Will Kemp wrote:
It sounds like hardware to me. And the first thing i'd suspect is
the flash memory in the MP3 player (assuming it's flash and not
hdd). Flash memory's got a limited life maybe it's come to the end
of it.
While it's true that Flash memory has a limited life that /shouldn't
lead to this sort of problem.
First: Flash memory life is limited in terms of the number of *write*
cycles that each cell can undergo before failing -- reading does not
cause wear. Modern flash chips can successfully be rewritten tens or
hundreds of thousands of times before failure is likely, and it's
unlikely that the memory in an MP3 player will have been written
anything like that often.
Second: flash chips have intelligent memory controllers that detect
failure on writing and map out failed blocks. If a bad block is detected
while writing a different block should be allocated and used in its
place -- so the write operation should always succeed. Once a block has
been written correctly it should be readable reliably until written
again.
The observable effect of approaching end-of-life in flash devices is
that the reported device size gets smaller as more and more bad blocks
are mapped out. This is easy enough to check for ...
Of course, flash chips can be -- and sometimes are -- damaged by
external factors (static, overvolting, overheating, cosmic rays) but I
would expect the device to pack up altogether if that had occurred.
It is still possible that the failure is a hardware problem, but my
first thought would be poor connection -- either a dry joint inside the
device or dirty contacts on the USB connector.
-- does the device work reliably when connecting with Windows (or any
other system)? If so, it's not going to be hardware.
Cheers,
Daniel.
.
- References:
- Recovering from USB mass storage corruption without rebooting
- From: Tony Houghton
- Re: Recovering from USB mass storage corruption without rebooting
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